Further Continuing Appropriations, Fiscal Year 2006

FURTHER CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS, FISCAL YEAR 2006 -- (House of Representatives - December 17, 2005)

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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I want Members of the House, at least those who are around, to understand what the controversy has been with respect to this continuing resolution today. Let me back up even further.

As the gentleman has indicated, the House Appropriations Committee was able to pass every bill through the House before we left for the August recess. Despite that fact, for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the Appropriations Committee, the fact is that, today, we are 2 months into the fiscal year and the Department of Defense and the Departments of Labor, Health, Education and Social Services still have not received their funding for the year under a regular appropriation bill. That means that about 65 percent of the discretionary spending in the budget still has not been tied down for the coming year.

That is not just a problem in Washington. It means that local people cannot plan. It means that school boards cannot plan. It means that the Pentagon cannot plan. And it discombobulates everybody. This is not the first time it has happened, but it is certainly one of the most troubling episodes that we have had in a long time.

I think we are here with so little of this work finished because I really do believe that the leadership of the House has tried to impose an agenda on the House and on the Senate which is so extreme that even members of their own majority party have rebelled. Example: We take a look at what happened on the PATRIOT Act. Example: We take a look at the inability to pass the labor health bill, first in the House and now in the Senate. It seems to me that a little more flexibility on the part of the House leadership could have resolved a lot of those problems.

Anyway, to bring us up to date, 10 minutes before the House opened today, we were informed on this side of the aisle that the continuing resolution to keep the government functioning for these agencies who have not yet received their funding, we received notice that a decision had been made to change the effective date of the continuing resolution, which meant that it would be extended through February 15 rather than simply to the end of the year.

It is one thing to provide a short extension so that the President has the ability to review legislation passed by the Congress before he signs it. It is quite another to try to leverage one group or another into a severe disadvantage with respect to some of this funding.

The problem with extending the CR to February 15 is that it creates a number of anomalies in both funding for the Defense Department and in the funding for the social service agencies which I do not think this Congress wants to be responsible for.

The problem with allowing the Pentagon, for instance, to continue on a CR, which is what would happen, the problem is that, at the levels under this CR, the military would be expected to run out of money for Iraq operations in January. That could create some significant problems for them. In addition, Pentagon contracts could be significantly delayed. Now, that could be overcome if we do manage to pass the Defense Appropriations Bill, and I hope we do, but we still would have a major problem with funding in the Labor-Health-Education bill.

Example: Everybody knows that, just a few days ago, the majority party restored funding to Rural Health Outreach Grants in order to try to overcome their inability to pass the Labor-Health bill earlier in the week. Guess what? The CR before us today takes out that additional money for Rural Health Outreach Grants, and it again returns us to a funding level which is 73 percent below last year. I do not think people want to do that, but that is the result of the continuing resolution.

The Community Services Block Grant Program, under the funding level in this CR, that program is cut in half from last year. The Low Income Heating Assistance Program, we had all kinds of people talking about adding money for that program, and yet under the funding level in this CR, LIHEAP is cut by $176 million. Under No Child Left Behind, under the funding level in this resolution, No Child Left Behind programs would be cut more than $1.1 billion below last year's level.

We have heard a lot of fulminating on both sides of the aisle about IDEA, about special education. Guess what? The funding level for this continuing resolution would freeze IDEA grants.

The International Labor Affairs Bureau, which protects American workers and wages through its efforts to eradicate child labor around the world, would be cut by 87 percent under the funding level in this continuing resolution. Unemployment help for people who are looking for jobs would be cut by $157 million under this continuing resolution level.

Now, it is one thing to say, all right, we will let that go for a week because it simply is a short-term convenience to the President. It is quite another thing to say that we are going to hold those programs to that level of funding through February 15. When you do that, you ruin some of those programs and you make miserable the lives of a lot of people who depend on those programs, which is why we objected on this side of the aisle.

Now that the majority party has returned to the original understanding that the CR will extend only for a week, time for us to get our work done; now that we are in a position where we are not going to be able to conveniently take a vacation until February 15 while these other programs suffer, I am perfectly happy to withdraw my objection.

So I congratulate the gentleman for talking to whoever he had to talk to in order to bring them to their senses.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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