DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, this amendment eliminates the $150 million of discretionary spending wasted on one of the least essential programs in the entire United States Government, the so-called Essential Air Service. That is the program that subsidizes empty and near-empty planes to fly from small airports to regional hubs that are usually just a few hours away or less by car.

This was supposed to be a temporary program to allow local communities and airports to readjust to airline deregulation back in 1978.

Last year, the Essential Air Service cost a total of nearly $300 million between direct taxpayer subsidies and fees to fly near-empty planes to underused airports. $150 million of that is in our control, and this amendment zeros it out and puts it toward deficit reduction.

We are often told that we now have a $200 per person cap on the subsidies, as if that wasn't bad enough, but that is only for flights under 210 miles. It continues unlimited subsidies over that distance, and actual subsidies per passenger can be over $1,000 per seat.

Year after year we are promised reform, and year after year the cost goes up. By the way, Essential Air Service flights are flown out of Merced and Visalia airports that serve my district in the Sierra Nevada. A tiny number of people actually use them, and the alternative is hardly catastrophic. Visalia and Merced are less than an hour's drive from Fresno air terminal. But I can assure you that every person in my district who hears about this waste of their money is outraged by it.

Rural life has great advantages and great disadvantages, and it is not the job of taxpayers who choose to live elsewhere to level out the differences.

Apologists for this wasteful spending tell us it is an important economic driver for these small airports, and I am sure that is so.

Whenever you give away money, the folks you are giving it to are always better off, but the folks you are taking it from are always worse off to exactly the same extent. Indeed, it is economic drivers like this that have Europe's economy right off a cliff.

Four years ago, one Member rushed to the microphone to suggest this was essential for emergency medical evacuations. Well, it has nothing to do with that. This program subsidizes regular scheduled commercial service that practically nobody uses. If it actually had a passenger base, we wouldn't need, in effect, to hand out wads of $100 bills to the few passengers who use it, would we?

An airline that so recklessly used its funds would quickly bankrupt itself. The same principle holds true for governments.

The Washington Post is not known as a bastion of fiscal conservatism, but I cannot improve upon an editorial a few years ago when it said: ``Ideally, EAS would be zeroed out, and the $200 million we waste on it devoted to a truly national purpose: perhaps deficit reduction, military readiness, or the social safety net. Alas, if Congress and the White House were capable of making such choices, we probably never would have had sequestration in the first place.''

There are many tough calls in setting fiscal priorities, but this isn't one of them. If the House of Representatives--where all appropriations begin, with a Republican majority pledged to stop wasting money--can't even agree to cut this useless program off from the trough, how does it expect to be taken seriously on the much tougher choices that lie ahead?

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Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is correct. It would cut off air service to communities that are usually just an hour or so drive from a major regional airport where they can obtain air service.

This is the kindest cut of all. Eliminating a temporary program established 39 years ago has become a poster child for wasteful Federal spending.

Now, our national debt has nearly doubled in 8 years. American taxpayers will pay $269 billion this year just in interest costs on that debt. If you are an average family paying average taxes, it means that $2,200 of your taxes this year will accomplish nothing more than renting the money we have already spent.

Continuing to pay for this obsolete and wasteful program with money we don't have is simply obscene. It makes a mockery of any claim that we cut spending to the bone, and I would ask for adoption of the amendment.

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