Transportation, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, the Judiciary, the District of Columbia, and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, 2006
TRANSPORTATION, TREASURY, HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, THE JUDICIARY, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, AND INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2006 -- (House of Representatives - June 29, 2005)
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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.
I associate myself with the remarks of the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Chairman SHUSTER). I would not come to the Floor particularly to make a case here, and the maker of this amendment knows full well that I am on his subcommittee and have strongly supported this effort and all of his efforts on drug reduction.
But the fact is this fund, the Federal Building Fund, has become a habit, and when we get to the point where we have a $1 billion hit on one fund, we have an unsustainable hit, and here comes $25 million more.
The Members may be unaware that the courts, which have strong homeland security issues, came to our subcommittee and asked to be excused from putting any money into the Federal Building Fund. The administration strongly opposed that because it would collapse the Federal Building Fund.
I just want to draw to the attention of Members that this $1 billion hit collapses the Federal Building Fund, and it is not just about making sure that Federal workers are comfortable. It is about, for example, an amendment that the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Shuster) and I were going to put in and now are not going to put in, although he is going to offer it I think and perhaps later withdraw it, to transfer some funds from the GSA administration to glass refraction because we cannot begin to make all of the Federal buildings secure throughout the United States, but we can at least keep glass, should there be some kind of bombing like Oklahoma City, from, in fact, falling in on people with sharp metal and all the rest of it.
So I just ask that Members stop here, and we have got to find some money for the Souder amendment. I think we should find it, and I think we should find it in conference. I think we should defeat this amendment now.
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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I want to strongly support his amendment. You see that this is a committee that is not adverse to reducing funding. We were not simply going to reduce it; we were going to put this funding where it was most needed, in the glass refraction program.
On the other hand, what led us to this moment was, of course, GSA's failures for the subcommittee, and those failures apparently have gotten the attention, at least the amendment of the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Shuster) has gotten the attention of GSA.
I share his frustration. GSA has not come forward with the information we wanted about its own housing. It wanted to move. We wanted to understand why it wanted to move out of owned space. Only cursory responses. We learned the courts want to waive any contribution to the building fund not initially through GSA. It was an outrage, and we learned it very late. And, of course, the prospectuses did not come before us, and the administrator himself was out of town when the hearing was to be held.
For that reason, I agreed entirely with the chairman that they needed to understand the professionalism that the subcommittee requires. They apparently now understand it. We want, frankly, to preserve as much of the Federal building fund now as is left, since it looks like we have virtually bankrupted it. So I would defer to the chairman as to what disposition he now wants to make of his original amendment.
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