Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, since 2001 I have served as chairman on three different appropriations subcommittees.

I chaired subcommittees on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, the Interior Department, and today the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development.

Over the years I made a lot of tough choices on which programs to fund and which programs not to fund. But never have things been as bad as they are today. The cuts that we are making to our appropriations bills under sequestration are strangling programs that must be funded. Programs that are vital to our economy, vital to public safety, and programs that promise to deliver the next breakthroughs in energy research.

To compound the problem, we are now just a few days away from a government shutdown that has the potential to devastate our economic recovery and shake the confidence in our government to get anything done.

I would like to speak today about the negative effects a shutdown and continued sequester would have on my subcommittee.

The agency within my subcommittee that may have the most direct impact on the public is the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps safeguards our dams, our levees and our drinking water, it keeps our harbors open for cargo ships, and it maintain more than 4,000 recreation sites. Simply put, a government shutdown would mean the termination of a wide range of vital Corps activities.

Work would stop on virtually all construction projects, studies and activities related to flood control and navigation across the country. These important projects protect tens of millions of Americans.

A shutdown would mean the Corps stops work on improving dam safety projects including the dam at California's Isabella Lake, the dam most at-risk of failure in the State. Halting these projects would endanger citizens and ultimately increase the cost to complete this vital work. What's more, these projects actually reduce overall costs to the federal government. Damage prevented by Corps projects exceeds $25 billion per year. Other Corps projects interrupted by a shutdown include strengthening levees and floodwalls to reduce the risk of loss of life and economic loss from flooding and coastal storms. Work would stop on improvements to flood protection levees along the Mississippi River, levees that experienced record flood levels in 2011. Projects in Boston, Kansas City, and Seattle would be suspended. Even worse, these construction delays would come at a time when severe storms are causing damage with greater frequency.

Even dam safety projects would be affected by a shutdown. One example is California's Folsom Dam, where the Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation are working to increase dam safety. A shutdown would likely cause the Corps and Reclamation to suspend contract activities, delaying this vital project. The Folsom Dam is a major component of the Central Valley Project, which provides clean water to more than 20 million Californians, and should not be put at risk by a government shutdown.

A shutdown will also have dramatic impacts on water-borne commerce. More than 2.3 billion tons of cargo moves through our marine transportation system. Improvements to channels, harbors and waterways ensure that this vital traffic flows without pause.

Projects at Oakland Harbor in California, Savannah Harbor in Georgia, and Charleston Harbor in South Carolina would be impacted by a shutdown, meaning higher construction and transportation costs.

The country's vast system of inland waterways would also suffer from a shutdown. More than 600 million tons of cargo move through our inland waterways on commercial ships. A shutdown would mean this cargo would be dramatically slowed, and the use of locks would likely not be available at all to recreational boaters. While facilities on lakes that combine flood control and hydropower would continue to operate because of safety issues, hydropower operations would likely be curtailed. This means 353 hydropower units operated by the Corps--which provide roughly one-quarter of the country's hydropower--would operate at reduced capacity. This would cut into the $1.5 billion in payments the units generate each year.

There are also major permitting and operational impacts that would be immediately noticeable. Processing of regulatory permits under the Clean Water Act, which the Corps handles, would be immediately suspended. In a typical year, the Corps processes more than 80,000 permit actions. This means anyone from an individual building a dock to a community planning a major development would not be able to move forward because they won't be able to secure a permit. The Corps would also be unable to provide enforcement actions on existing permitted activities, which could harm sensitive environmental or aquatic resources.

Another visible effect would be the shuttering of recreation areas. The Corps of Engineers is the largest provider of outdoor recreation among all Federal agencies. They maintain more than 4,200 recreation sites at 422 projects in 43 states, with more than 370 million visits each year. Those visitors spend more than $18 billion annually and support 350,000 full-time or part-time jobs. All would be suspended by a government shutdown.

The Department of Energy would also face severe limitations under a shutdown. Research grants to national labs and universities would be suspended. These grants fund important clean energy challenges related to biofuels, supercomputing, and materials research. The output of world-class science facilities on cutting edge research and product development may be significantly reduced. With U.S. leadership in science threatened by China, Japan and Europe, now is not the time to suspend major scientific research.

Regarding the national security missions of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a government shutdown may delay important nuclear modernization activities. A government shutdown may disrupt and delay efforts to replace aging components in every single nuclear weapon in the stockpile. For example, delays in replacing aging components in the W76 submarine-launched warhead--which makes up more than 50 percent of the Nation's nuclear deterrent--would have serious impacts to the Navy's nuclear deterrence mission. Upgrades to aging infrastructure related to uranium, plutonium and high explosives capabilities would also be delayed. Delays of just days can add millions of dollars to a project's bottom line.

A government shutdown may also delay the design of a new nuclear reactor for the Ohio-class submarine. A shutdown may also delay refueling one of only three training nuclear reactors for sailors, which is critical for supplying sufficient numbers of sailors to man the U.S. submarine fleet.

Finally, a government shutdown will delay and increase costs to clean up and remediate nuclear contamination at former nuclear weapons and nuclear energy research sites. These activities should be completed as quickly as possible to protect human health.

I have laid out only a taste of the effects of a government shutdown. What I cannot begin to convey is the harm to millions of families who would be out of work or whose work would be curtailed because of canceled projects across the country.

This is only one of 12 subcommittees. A government shutdown would be folly, and we must prevent it from happening.

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Before I close, I would like to touch on another threat to the agencies funded through my subcommittee, and that is the dangerous and ongoing cuts forced on us by the sequester.

With Congress focused on this immediate threat, we risk losing sight of the even more dangerous and long-term consequences of sequestration. Once again, the Energy and Water Appropriations bill provides a fine example of the choices--and dangers--that we face. The Senate bill funds the Corps of Engineers at $5.3 billion.

The House bill, based on sequester levels of funding, would slash that by $596 million. This would take money from vital flood control, ecosystem restoration and navigation projects. The House also would not approve a single new study or project, further delaying vital flood protection and navigation needs. The sequester would also jeopardize such vital projects as harbor maintenance and dredging, putting a crimp on billions of dollars in cargo that moves through our coasts. The House sequester level also slashes $136 million from the Bureau of Reclamation's budget, 12 percent lower than the Senate level.

One example of what the sequester would cut: The Senate bill directs funds to the WaterSmart Program and the Recycled Water Program, both of which increase the efficiency of water use in the West. With record-breaking droughts, farmers are desperately in need of more water, but the sequester would dry up these programs.

The Senate would also restore funding arbitrarily cut by the House from restoration programs such as the San Joaquin River Restoration in California. This joint Federal-State-local program was the result of a settlement that ended 17 years of litigation. Defunding the program could force the project back into the courtroom.

The House funding level also further weakens U.S. scientific leadership and efforts to improve the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers through the Department of Energy. The House would cut funds for the Office of Sciences by $500 million, the cutting edge work of ARPA-E by $329 million, and efficiency and renewable energy programs by $1.4 billion.

While Europe and Asia invest heavily in renewable energy and basic research, the House funding under sequester would cut in half our investments in renewable energy development and by 10% investments in basic research.

The government shutdown is a manufactured crisis and it is dangerous. The continuation of the sequester--while less immediate--is arguably even more dangerous.

I hope my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, particularly in the House, will join with Democrats to keep our government operating at responsible levels. We need to make those tough choices, we need to keep the government open and we must repeal sequester.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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