Interior, Environment, Financial Services, and General Government

Floor Speech

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Mrs. CAPITO. Mr. President, I am really pleased to be on the floor today to join my fellow Senator from Missouri to talk about, as a fellow member of the Appropriations Committee, what I think are the real highlights and the good parts about the fact that the process is moving but also what is contained within the process.

Senator Blunt did a great job, I think, of explaining some of the more detailed areas that are important to the entire Country but also to his area. I am going to do the same for my State of West Virginia.

I want to commend the committee leadership, both the committee chairs and the ranking members, and our Senate leadership, both Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer, for moving this process forward and for making good on the promise that we are going to return the appropriations process to regular order.

I tried it to explain it in a radio interview today. I found myself saying: Well, of course, we would be doing this every year, because appropriating money every year is one of the core missions of the Congress. It kind of hasn't worked out that way. This progress that we are making on these four bills and the three previous bills, I think, are an indicator that we will have overwhelming bipartisan support. Each of these bills was written under the budget agreement that we passed and President Trump signed into law.

These bills address a broad range of national concerns and priorities. They highlight areas that we found bipartisan agreement and support on. I am also happy that many of these bills not only have national priorities, but a lot of the national priorities are focused toward different States--rural America, urban America, agriculture America, highly technical jobs, et cetera.

Since my first days in the Senate, I have been committed to doing all that I can to advance the issues that help the Mountain State, including improving our economy and making room for growth and development, fighting burdensome and overreaching environmental regulations that have crippled our coal industry, improving broadband access in our rural communities and across the States, and fighting the opioid epidemic that has disproportionately affected my State of West Virginia and is devastating so many families and communities not only in our State but across the country.

The bills under consideration today include resources and directions to address each of these priorities and many others.

In our Omnibus appropriations act of 2018, we made a significant investment in a pilot project at the USDA to improve rural broadband in unserved and underserved areas. The State of West Virginia is right in there in terms of lack of broadband deployment in our most rural areas. The Agriculture appropriations bill in this minibus builds on those investments and provides an additional $400 million into that pilot program.

Closing the digital divide has been one of my top priorities. I started my Capito Connect plan to talk about the progress that can be made. This pilot program will help us to build on that progress and connect areas that previously lacked service, making that the highlight of the bill for me.

We had a hearing today about 5G in the Commerce Committee and about how much faster speeds and more advanced technology can improve the economy and how it can be extrapolated to the numbers of jobs and the numbers of dollars into the economy. I am a firm believer that technology is going to drive this, but for those areas that are still left behind or are still on the wrong side of the digital divide, certainly, the program within the USDA is going to be a big boost.

I have already had several conversations with USDA to make sure they understand the unique challenges that we face in West Virginia when it comes to connectivity and so that they continue to keep these challenges in mind as they move forward on the pilot programs.

Every Senator here could make an argument on what their particular challenges are. One of the challenges that we face that some of our midwesterners don't face as much is our terrain. We are not called the Mountain State for nothing. It is hard to drive from one place to another without being in a mountain. If you don't live on a hill, you live in the valley. That creates challenges for connectivity that technology is going to drive. I am very encouraged about this. I am very encouraged, not just about the broadband part of agriculture but the rural development, water, and electricity infrastructure and about opposing cuts to several programs that have been very helpful to our rural communities.

West Virginia, as does every State, also has challenges and opportunities in the transportation sector. I see the chairman of the Transportation Subcommittee here, Senator Collins. She has done great work on the T-HUD appropriations bill. Some of these--certainly, the Airport Improvement Program and the Contract Tower Program--are very important to our smaller airports as well as to our cities, which receive the CDBG funding. They provide ways to improve communities and ways to move forward with the housing and development we need. Also, just in a smaller sense, they help the rail service by ensuring we have a ticket agent in Charleston for Amtrak. It sounds like a small thing, but it is good for tourism and good for our city and good that our Hinton Railroad days will be able to go on uninterrupted.

One thing that has been interrupted in the last several years is any kind of sustained economic progress in our coal and energy sectors--the result, I believe, of the previous administration's never-ending war on coal. Thanks to the new administration, that war is over. This bill will help us in making sure that what remains will give us a fair and even playing field.

The Interior portion of this bill ensures that the EPA returns to its core mission of environmental cleanup. The Interior bill, which, I should note, passed the subcommittee by 31 to 0--everybody voted for it in committee--also emphasizes the need to fund the deferred maintenance of our national parks. This is something for which I have long advocated. We are at a point at which we are really going to make a significant difference here.

The Secretary of the Interior is really devoted to this, as is the President. This is very much a bipartisan effort.

It restores proposed cuts to the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds and grants programs that are tremendously helpful to States and localities. Some of these grants are not very large, but they make the difference of there being clean, drinkable water and water systems as opposed to having to bring your water in, which, in this day and age, in my opinion, in our country shouldn't be happening.

The bill also includes funding to continue a pilot program through the Abandoned Mine Lands Funds to invest in projects that will strengthen our local economies. Obviously, this has been very helpful in West Virginia and in Pennsylvania. We have a lot of abandoned mine land area that needs reclamation, that needs repurposing, and this program is very helpful for that.

The final bill is the Financial Services and General Government bill. I served as the chair of the FSGG bill in the last Congress, during the fiscal year 2018 budget. I was pleased that the funding levels we placed in fiscal year 2018 have remained and that some of the priorities have remained in fiscal year 2019, including a historic increase for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, called the HIDTA Program. This is out of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, where you get a coordinated effort from your State, local, and Federal law enforcement to stop the illegal flow of drugs into our country, which is literally killing a generation and is killing a lot of our communities.

We have an increase in there for drug-free communities, something that is a ground-up program, where your communities get together and ask: How do we solve this problem we have in our small communities? This increase, I think, demonstrates a commitment to the Office of National Drug Control Policy and a rejection of the proposed elimination of the ONDCP.

In having been a Member who voted for the historic tax cuts and tax relief we passed in December, I want to make sure the IRS can implement this so we don't have a glitch or a hitch while people are getting more money back when filing their new taxes. The IRS needs these resources. It just so happens that a lot of those IRS workers actually live and work in the State of West Virginia, so this will have a great impact, I think, in my region.

As one can see, we are doing the people's business by taking up and debating these appropriations bills. I think the committee is functioning, and the Senate floor is already functioning with three bills having gone out and there having been the opportunity for everybody to have weighed in, yea or nay. That is kind of why we are sent here, isn't it? We are sent here to express an opinion, to vote, to make the thoughts of our constituents and our own thoughts known. I am even proud that a lot of the resources we are going to be addressing in these bills will help to address very important West Virginia priorities.

I look forward to the continuing debate on amendments, to the continuing openness of the process, and to the continuing cooperation and dedication of spirit to do the work we have been sent to do--to appropriate the money, to prioritize our tax dollars, and to show the efficiency and care that every single one of our taxpayers deserves. That is what we are doing today.

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