Project Safe Neighborhoods Grant Program Authorization Act of 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Texas is quite right. This bill's pay-for comes through consolidation of similar programs, and I think it is important to briefly go over that.

Working with the Attorney General's Office, the author, Mrs. Comstock, went to great lengths to find programs that are essentially doing much the same thing in which, by consolidating, you pick up efficiencies. I particularly note that item two in the bill, the pay-for, the Edward Byrne Memorial criminal justice innovation program, is but a small part of the overall so-called Byrne program.

Many of the things the gentlewoman from Texas cited are good and are not being consolidated but, rather, a small amount. This targeted approach with our limited funds allows those funds to go further; and particularly as we look at community outreach, these funds, by being consolidated, are part of a community outreach and will be used in similar ways to the programs that they are taking from, but taking from it, in this case, in a consolidated way.

So I want to thank a former staff member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the committee that deals with efficiency in government, for looking through the details of these appropriated funds and finding a way to bring them together to give both flexibility and efficiency that I believe this will adhere to. It is the reason that this is a bipartisan bill.

The reason that it is so widely accepted is that it has been narrowly targeted. And although I share with the gentlewoman from Texas, my friend from Houston, that in a perfect world we would be plussing-up funds, if we are not able to do that at this time, I would support and work with the gentlewoman any time to try to do something similar for some of the areas of her concern.

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