Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2011
Floor Speech
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Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I would oppose the amendment, both as the gentleman has described it and also as it is written. As the amendment is written and in our hands, it is a straight across-the-board amendment of a couple of billion dollars difference from the one that was offered by Mr. Culberson earlier and has been defeated by roll call vote in the last round of roll calls.
As described by the gentleman, he is dealing with monies that are not yet expended in the Recovery Act.
And those monies in the Recovery Act are ones that are, in the Recovery Act, those are monies, some of which are under high-speed rail or TIGER Grants, those monies have not yet been fully obligated, but they were not expected ever to have expended out in this first couple of years of the Recovery Act's life.
They were expected to be expended within the next 2 or 3 years at our given time until the end of fiscal 2012 to be expended. Others are being expended and really going into jobs right now, day after day after day. Every day, more of the monies that spend out more rapidly get used and get counted as having been expended at the end of every month.
But the amendment that is in our hands is specifically merely a sum of money taken off the bottom line of the bill on all appropriated funds, which is all of the discretionary $67 billion, and $10 billion off $67 billion would be about 16 or so, 15 or 16 percent of that appropriated money that the bill involved. But it has nothing to do with monies that are related to the ARRA.
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Mr. OLVER. Reclaiming my time, but the gentleman is not talking about the amendment that is before us. He is talking about a different issue, about money that has not been expended in ARRA funds or money that has not yet been expended in the 2010. I am not quite sure which it is.
But the amendment that is before us, at least as we have understood it, as we have it given to us, is an amendment that simply takes from the bottom line of the bill before us from the discretionary amount a total of $10.5 billion, and I must oppose that proposal.
In closing, I just want to repeat again that our bill is already $1.3 billion below the President's request that, as I had said earlier today, and have said at least twice, that we have used the President's request. We have not funded, in the base bill that is here today, several items that have never been authorized and really require authorization that total $4.8 billion.
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Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, this amendment provides a new wrinkle on what we have been dealing with earlier. Again, this is somewhat different from what the gentlewoman has expressed, but as written, it reads, ``Each amount appropriated or otherwise made available by this act that is not required to be appropriated or otherwise made available by a provision of law is hereby reduced by 5 percent.'' Now, what that means is it's not just discretionary expenditure, but it also applies to the nondiscretionary part of this bill. It is not just on the $67 billion of discretionary expenditure that is part of this underlying bill, but the whole $126 billion, which covers all of the contractor authority for all of the small safety agencies that get money out of the Highway Trust Fund, and also applies to the moneys that go to the FTA that come out of the transit portion of the Highway Trust Fund. So that is the way that is written.
There is a provision at the end, the part that I read, ``or otherwise made available by a provision of law,'' which leaves CBO unable to score this amendment at all, and they cannot tell us what it really is meant to do. It says it cannot be implemented in this form.
So I must oppose this amendment for all of those reasons, because it goes far beyond the discretionary expenditure. That is different. Each of the earlier large cut amendments have been ones that purported to take only from the discretionary expenditure, and this one covers all of what is involved in this legislation, both the discretionary and the contract authority supported parts of the legislation, plus apparently some other things.
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Mr. OLVER. Well, we cannot change the language of the amendment at this point. I would be happy to work with the gentlewoman to find out exactly what was intended to be done here and try to work with you, but for the moment, I must oppose this amendment.
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Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, the amendment is not a modest one by any means. It is a double ax taken to the legislation that is involved. It takes $18 billion out of only the discretionary amount of funding that is provided in the underlying bill. As such, that is between 20 and 25 percent of the reduction in all of the discretionary accounts from the underlying bill.
Who would have ever thought that we would have gotten so deep in deregulation and had our major financial services regulating agencies so asleep at the switch that we would have ended up in a housing crisis, a foreclosure crisis, that has been raging to the point where there are 6 or 8 million foreclosed homes? It almost brought, not only the American financial system to its knees, but almost the whole world's financial system to its knees. It ended up with the Secretary of the Treasury, under the administration of the previous President, coming to Congress and asking for us--begging us, begging the Congress--to bail out the biggest banks in this country, the banks which caused the housing crisis by running a casino on Wall Street.
In that process, by that time, by the time they came to Congress to ask for that bailout, we were already four quarters into a recession in this country, a recession
that raged throughout the whole of the year of 2008 and on into at least the first two quarters of 2009.
We have begun to come back out of that recession. We passed a stimulus bill within 1 month of the new President's being inaugurated, which, within another month, turned job losses to job gains--or at least to a reduction of job losses for a series of months. Now, in the last 6 months or so, there have been job gains. We have been out of the recession, but it is not a recovery that is happening very quickly.
Whoever would have thought that all of those things would have happened?
We have a series of economists who pointed out we had to do exactly those things--first, the bailout of the banks, which most of us in Congress, I think from both sides, voted for, and there were people on the other side of the aisle who voted for that legislation. Most of us expected that there would be some kind of evenhanded handling of the largest investment banks and also of those who had been bilked out of their money in the housing crisis and who had gone through foreclosures, but the foreclosure crisis has gone on and gone on and gone on much farther than it should have been allowed to go.
Whoever would have thought that all of those things would have happened in America?
We are now coming out of this recession. If an amendment were implemented, such as the one the gentleman from Ohio has proposed, it would send us right back into the recession. We cannot do this. Though, I wonder, as I think I may have asked you earlier, Mr. Chairman: Is this a deliberate effort to put us back into a double-dip recession that would be so similar to the Great Depression?
This was exactly what happened in 1937, which was 4 years after the inauguration of FDR. Four years later, we went back into a recession, which took another 4 years of experiencing a really very, very bad economy. We are coming out with the rather prudent actions that have been taken by Congress and by this administration, and we must continue on that path.
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Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I just want to express that this amendment for a program which is totally authorized, and we are not running above the authorization number on Amtrak by any means at all, but this is a killer amendment for Amtrak to remove all of their capital funds, as this amendment purports to do. So I oppose the amendment, and urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment.
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Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I am very interested in this conversation. The gentleman from Arizona, who is usually so rational about this whole effort that he puts forward, he is going to earn a reputation as a grinch for trying to take the one Member representing 4 million people in Puerto Rico, taking a program that would provide ADA compliance in a very small park in a community that's done for children and teens, and he wants to deny the representative for those 4 million people the opportunity to have a very small earmark.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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