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Transportation, Treasury, and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, 2005

By: Ernest Istook, Jr.

Date: Sept. 14, 2004

Location: Washington, DC

Issues: Transportation Defense

TRANSPORTATION, TREASURY, AND INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2005 -- (House of Representatives - September 14, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 770 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 5025.

BREAK I N TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I am pleased to present to the House the appropriations bill H.R. 5025, making appropriations for the Departments of Transportation and Treasury, and independent agencies for fiscal year 2005.

Mr. Chairman, this is one of the most fiscally responsible bills that we have considered this year. It is a large bill. It is a diverse bill. It includes funding for the Department of Transportation, the Treasury Department, the General Services Administration, the Executive Office of the President, National Archives, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Personnel Management and many other agencies that are critical to the functioning of our Federal Government.

This measure is also one that includes a number of government-wide general provisions that are there to facilitate efficiency and effectiveness in the day-to-day functions of large and small Federal agencies.

Mr. Chairman, we have a lot of budget constraints this year. In examining the budget picture for this particular bill, it is important to note that this bill is within the budget that has been produced by this House of Representatives and the allocation that has been provided to this subcommittee.

Of course, the Congress, working with the President and his administration, has rightfully put a priority on spending for the ongoing conflict in Iraq and the war on terror. At the same time, we have a serious Federal deficit. These have forced this body and our Committee on Appropriations and our subcommittee to make many difficult and challenging choices. This bill reflects the difficulty of those choices.

In fact, if you look at this bill, Mr. Chairman, and compare it with last year's parallel bill, you will find that this particular measure is $3 billion below the amount that we spent on the same accounts last year. There are reasons that it is not a pure apples-to-apples comparison, but, nevertheless, the bill is below what the similar funding was for last year. That reflects, again, the priority choices and the tough choices we have made.

So we will hear, during debate upon this measure, many people say, "Oh, I wish we had more money for this program or that or some other." But the answer is that we do not. We are in deficit spending already, and this is about as fiscally responsible a bill as you will find before this body this year.

Overall, the bill provides a total of $89.9 billion for the Department of Transportation, for the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, highways, transit, rail programs, seafaring programs, and the heart of the executive branch, including the White House itself.

Overall, for salary and expense accounts, the bill does provide increases, some 2.6 percent, but that is within the context of a bill that overall is $3 billion less than the bill last year, so many agencies will have to do some belt tightening. We have tried to give them the maximum flexibility to manage those resources.

I appreciate the fact that the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Young) did not have the funds he would have liked to have had to put into highways and other forms of transportation, but he gave us a fair allocation and I am grateful for it. Not only is it $3 billion below last year's spending on these accounts, it is below the amounts requested by the President in his budget.

There were some highly controversial provisions we did not include. Some Members said if you can put a provision in the bill to end a process known as dumping, which has to do with reparation payments to industry to offset unfair trade practices, then you can grab over a billion dollars to put back into the bill. That would not have been good because whatever Members' position on dumping is, it has not passed the House and we cannot assume we will have the money.

Despite the budget constraints we have, I am pleased we have been able to improve the most important part of our transportation network, and that is funding for highways. The $34 billion in this bill for highway funding is a billion dollars above the funding level for highways last year. So in the context of a bill that itself is $3 billion below last year, when we are still able to improve highway funding, that shows we have addressed priorities and tried to put the money where it is most important.

That money for highways is going to be good news for the economy because each billion dollar investment is estimated to create some 40,000 jobs.

There is also some confusion in the context of this bill, Mr. Chairman, because we have a two-stage process. We have still pending in the conference committee a surface transportation highways and transit reauthorization bill. I do not want to confuse this bill with that. The reauthorization bill establishes a framework for spending transportation dollars, but this bill actually provides the money. We do not have a new framework created, so we have had to assume the old framework remains in place, but we are going to have some controversy over that because we have not been able to achieve passage into law of a highway reauthorization bill. We have some technicalities, some rules of this House, and I know many Members are going to come forward and raise points of order. They are going to say you have to strike this part out of the bill because we have not authorized it.

Well, we have been waiting a year for an authorization bill which has not happened. We had to do our work anyway. Some Members may want to pick the bill apart and say you are putting money into something that is not authorized. Under the rules of the House they may be successful in doing that. But I want to reassure every Member of this body that we are going to repair those things when it gets to conference. We are going to have the same kind of responsible bill that the Committee on Appropriations has produced that comes out of conference regardless of how Members may want to pick at it with parliamentary tactics on the House floor today.

It is not the fault of the Committee on Appropriations that a reauthorization measure has not passed as the rules of the House dictate it should have been a year ago.

Looking at some other details of the bill, the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, will receive a 3 percent increase for its operations, less than they requested, but more than the government-wide average for nondefense, nonhomeland security programs. That again is because we have put priority into aviation funding, just as we have in highway funding, and we have put cuts in place elsewhere in the bill to compensate for that.

The bill meets the aviation funding guarantees mandated by authorizing legislation which has passed this body. It provides the budget request for the capital investment programs of the FAA and grants-in-aid for airports all across America.

The essential air service program, which I am not personally fond of, but one which is important to many Members of this body, receives the same funding as it did in fiscal year 2004. And there is $20 million for the small community air service program.

Amtrak is always a point of controversy in this House. The bill proposes $900 million for Amtrak, the same amount suggested by the administration in their budget proposal, and I believe it is a responsible number for Amtrak because Amtrak still has not resolved its long-term problems, and we have not developed the kind of partnerships that we need with States and communities that want Amtrak service investing in Amtrak service. The administration believes and I agree that realistic Amtrak reform has to be enacted before we start putting more money into that passenger rail service.

The Secretary of Transportation and the President and his administration believe the amount in this bill is sufficient to keep that rail service operating in the next year, and I agree with them.

Funding for transit in the bill is essentially at the level of fiscal year 2004, also the same as the administration requested, but we have done some adjustment inside of the numbers. Within the overall total, we have put more of the transit funding into the formula grant program that goes into every community in every State in the country on a formula basis. That benefits everyone. We put more money through the formula and less in the so-called new starts program which is fixed guideway and light rail programs, and so forth, which only benefit a handful of communities. We have tried to put the transit funding more than ever before into a formula that benefits everyone, not just select areas of the country.

I want to make one more comment about the new starts program. We do not know how much money is going to be available over the next 5 years to fund these expensive rail systems that a lot of communities want and often do not do the necessary cost-benefit analysis. The Department of Transportation Inspector General told us this year there are far more systems being proposed than we will ever have money to pay for. The requests exceed the resources by billions of dollars, so this bill takes a prudent step to slow down that program, put money instead into the formula grants instead of making some decisions that we might regret tomorrow on how we prioritize the new starts program. But the bill does fund all of the existing full funding grant agreements on new start programs that are between different communities and the Federal Transit Administration.

In the Treasury Department of this bill, which includes the Internal Revenue Service, we essentially have funded it at the same level of fiscal year 2004. Some of the proposals we believe need further refinement. New initiatives such as the IRS initiative to increase its hiring to improve collections are too financially ambitious for the budget climate we have.

One of the largest increases in the bill, 12.7 percent, goes to what is known as FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It is part of the Department of Treasury and it is part of counterterrorism activities, trying to disrupt the financial basis of terrorists.

When we look at another part of the bill, the Executive Office, the President, the White House and the offices that work with the White House, it is actually a little below last year's because we have reduced contract programs. The bill includes funding for the majority of the construction program of the GSA, General Services Administration. That is the landlord for the Federal Government. But even though it includes the majority of the GSA construction program and GSA says it has something like a $7 billion backlog, we have shaved back those requests to meet our budget allocation.

All 12 border stations that are proposed in the budget request are fully funded because of the priority that we have given to homeland security. A more complete summary of all of the funding levels in the bill, as well as significant provision, is in the committee report at pages 3 and 4, and I direct Members to those pages.

Mr. Chairman, a final comment before I close my debate for now. My final comment is about the messiness that I
know we are going to experience with the points of order and money in the bill being stricken. We are probably going to have to offer some amendments on what do we do with the money. I would just as soon have it go to pay the national debt, but in our protocol that is not how it works in this process. So if some money is stricken on points of order, I will offer the necessary amendments to park that money into some of the major accounts with the understanding that when we get to conference we will be overcoming the parliamentary problems of those points of order and restoring that money to the transportation programs which I think some people are going to try to take it from with their points of order.

I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver), our ranking member. The gentleman presents his personal views and the views of the minority tenaciously and effectively and is good to work with. I appreciate that and his no-nonsense approach to things.

I also appreciate our staff that has worked so well and will reiterate a thank you to them later on before we close this debate.

This is a good, solid bill. It is responsible. It merits and deserves the support of every Member of this body, and I ask that Members support it when we come to passage of the bill.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I appreciate the help of the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver) in trying to expedite the time for the benefit of everyone.

Let me just make a couple of responses to things that a couple of speakers mentioned on the Help America Vote Act. We have provided federally something like a little bit over $3 billion in the last couple of years to improve voting systems around the country. A billion dollars of that remains unspent. The States are not prepared for us to add more money on this bill or any other bill because they have got $1 billion that has not been spent yet. They are waiting on some voting standards that are supposed to be coming from the Federal Commission, which has not produced those standards yet. So I do not think it would be responsible for us to take away from other urgent and pressing priorities to put more money into an account that already has much more money than it is able to spend. So I figured it was important to mention that.

Let me, in closing, Mr. Chairman, repeat something I said before, and I realize it is confusing to anyone that may be listening as well as to Members. We will be having in this bill a number of parliamentary tactics, points of order brought up. It is not because we on the Committee on Appropriations have not produced a responsible piece of legislation, trying to fund the most important priorities in transportation and in the Federal agencies that are a part of this bill. However, because the authorizing committee has not been able to complete its work, it is overdue by over a year now, we have some things that technically are unauthorized programs. It is unauthorized for this Congress to provide Federal highway transportation dollars.

Now, it is authorized to collect the gasoline tax that our citizens and our constituents pay at the pump. They are paying the fuel tax, but it is not authorized with that money to go back into the roads. That is not right, so we went ahead and we provided that transportation funding. We provided the highway funding and the transit funding and the aviation funding, even though the authorizers say, Well, it is not authorized.

So because of that, they are going to come to this floor, and people are going to say: Well, strike out this part of the bill. Strike out funding for highways. Strike out provisions, some of which spend money and some of which, frankly, save money. We are going to have a messy process.

But ultimately, when this committee produces the House-Senate conference report, we are going to take care of those things that are addressed in this. We will resolve the parliamentary problems because, frankly, the points of order, the parliamentary points of order do not lie against a conference report as they do against legislation in the House.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. ISTOOK. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. OLVER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I would like to clarify on the point that the gentleman just made and the example that you just used, that the authorization bill on T&I highway programs has an extension. As of the moment, it is an extension to September 24. If there is not a full bill, authorization bill that has passed by then, there will be another extension into the next fiscal year. And the irony is that we would then be operating within the authorization of the extension into the next fiscal year in what we would be doing.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is certainly correct.

Reclaiming my time, this Committee on Appropriations is doing its work, whether the rest of Congress is able to for whatever reason fulfill their work or not. I regret that this is going to be a messy process. We are going to have some things stricken out of the bill. If the things that the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure want stricken out of the bill are all out, we would be above our budget allocation. We would be in violation of the rules of this House on the amount of money that we have to spend. That is pretty bad when we have a deficit already to make it worse.

We are not going to do that. We will make sure appropriate amendments are offered and that this bill ultimately is within the amount of money that has been allocated to our subcommittee. There may be some money that has been shifted about to what essentially will be a holding account, just to make sure that we reserve it, and we will resolve those things in committee.

I realize it is confusing, Mr. Chairman, but I appreciate the trust and patience of the Members of this body in resolving it.

I do, in final comment, want to make sure that I express my appreciation for the people that work behind the scenes so hard and so diligently to help us present this legislation: The chief clerk of our subcommittee, Rich Efford; the staff members of the subcommittee, Cheryle Tucker, Leigha Shaw, Dena Baron, Kristen Jones; and a member of my staff who works on these issues, Kurt Conrad, as well as my chief of staff, John Albaugh.

We are grateful because we, as Members of Congress, could not do our work without the good support of these people.

I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts and other Members for their comments. I ask every Member to support this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I was ready to yield back the balance of my time, but I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica).

Mr. MICA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

I just want to say that the Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury and Independent Agencies has done an outstanding job of bringing this legislation before the House of Representatives, and it is during some very difficult times with some constraints.

I am going to be here representing the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, raising some points of order, not to object to specific actions the subcommittee has taken; I think they have been well-intended on behalf of the appropriators, but to offer and preserve some of the integrity of the authorization process on behalf of the full committee, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), myself, and other subcommittee chairs.

So again, it is a process of give and take, but we do know the constraints the gentleman has worked under, and we have to preserve the integrity of our jurisdiction. And I think that is important in this legislative process.

So I congratulate the gentleman from Oklahoma and the staff on the fine job they have done, and we will offer these in that light.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica).

[Begin Insert]

Mr. PASTOR. Mr. Chairman, the bill we are considering funds an important national security program. The Maritime Security Program ensues that a fleet of privately owned, commercially viable and militarily useful vessels are available to meet national defense and other security requirements.

A critical new element of the MSP program as reauthorized in the Department of Defense FY04 Authorization Act is the construction and operation of militarily useful U.S.-flag product tankers, which are essential for the carriage of jet fuel and other refined petroleum products. To facilitate the construction of U.S.-flag tankers in American shipyards for the MSP program, the FY04 Defense Authorization Act created the National Defense Tank Vessel Construction Assistance Program.

Implementation of this program has been underway for seven months, with seven proposals submitted to the Maritime Administration (MARAD) to construct tankers for the MSP program. Final proposals for the program are due very shortly-on October 22, 2004--with awards scheduled to occur in January 2005. However, a provision in the Transportation Appropriations Bill-sec. 187--would bring this vital program to a halt by prohibiting any funds from being expended by MARAD to administer or ward any of the contracts under the new program.

On August 24, 2004, the U.S. Transportation Command, the Defense Department's logistics arm, identified "New Tank Vessels ..... constructed in the United States after November 25, 2003, and capable of carrying militarily useful petroleum products," as critical to the new MSP fleet. I am concerned about the potential impact this section 187 prohibition would have on our Nation's military sealift at a time when the support of our overseas troops is critical.

I intend to work with the Committee and Subcommittee in conference to ensure that this key component of our military sealift is not jeopardized, and I encourage my colleagues who share this concern to do the same.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Sanders Amendment.

The Sanders Amendment would ensure that the Treasury department not use any of its funds to undermine the federal court decision in Cooper v. IBM that held that cash balance conversions violate federal pension and age discrimination law.

We've been here many times before.

In fact, this is the fourth time that the House is voting to protect older workers' pensions under cash balance pension plan conversions. The last 2 times the amendment passed by 308-121 and 258-160.

Instead of voting to prevent the Treasury department from undermining workers' pensions, I wish we were voting on affirmative legislation to set standards for cash balance plans.

This issue has been going on since 1999.

In 1999, IBM converted its pension plan to a cash balance plan.

Luckily, it's computer savvy workers quickly figured out that the conversion would reduce their expected pensions.

The workers mobilized and got Congress to hold hearings.

The Clinton administration imposed a moratorium on approvals of conversions in September 1999.

But then, the new Bush administration tried to issue regulations lifting the moratorium and permit conversions without
any worker protections.

Immediately 218 members of Congress wrote to the President urging him to revise the regulations and protect older workers.

Four times the House and Senate have voted to require Treasury to withdraw its regulations and protect older workers.

Finally, this year, in 2004, the Bush administration relented and withdrew the regulations. The administration even sent up a revised legislative proposal that contained a modicum of older worker protections though it did not go far enough to protect older workers.

But, still the issue is not resolved.

Either Congress or the courts must set standards for cash balance plans and conversions to such plans.

The Republican Congress has done nothing on this issue for almost six years.

If anything, Republican leaders would defer to employer lobbying and simply permit cash balance conversions without any protections for older workers.

That's why the Courts may have to be the body that resolves some of these issues.

One court, the federal district court for the state of Illinois, determined that conversions are illegal. Other courts have disagreed. These cases and others still waiting to be heard will take years to resolve.

This amendment makes clear that the Treasury department shall not interfere in these cases.

Today worker pension security is in crisis.

This administration has done nothing to protect workers' pensions and done everything to undermine them.

They didn't protect workers after Enron and WorldCom from employers loading pension plans with employer stock and letting the executives protect themselves while leaving the workers stuck with worthless stock.

They didn't protect participants in 401(k) plans from a broad range of mutual fund abuses that have decimated retirement nest eggs.

And they are not protecting workers now from rampant pension underfunding. The PBGC, the agency that insures traditional pensions, has a $10 billion deficit. And if the airlines go under, the deficit will increase by another $30 billion. Over 1,000 pension plans are more than $50 million underfunded. And workers don't even know because the PBGC is required to keep the information secret.

The administration and the Republican majority are doing nothing to protect worker pensions.

I urge my colleagues to vote once again and remind the majority that it is the will of the Congress that older workers be protected in cash balance pension plan conversions.

[End Insert]

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.