Conference Report on H.R. Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. CUELLAR. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Ranking Member Lowey for yielding, and I want to thank her for her leadership that she provides in the Appropriations Committee.

I also want to thank Chairman Frelinghuysen. As Ms. Wasserman Schultz said, we are going to miss you. We appreciate your leadership, and we thank you. You are a decent human being, and we really appreciate your friendship.

I also want to thank the staff and the Members on both sides of the aisle who have worked in a very bipartisan way to address these issues that are important.

Every year, we have to pass the appropriations bill. It is the train that has to pass every year. And I certainly want to thank Mrs. Lowey, the chairman, and the folks responsible for making this happen.

First of all, let me talk about defense.

I certainly agree with the Members that this provides billions of dollars to make sure that we restore critical military readiness programs. We have to make sure we have a strong military, and with this funding, we will. I certainly appreciate the sacrifice that the men and women make to protect our country, and this is what this appropriation bill does.

We also fully fund the 2.6 percent pay raise for our military families because, again, we have to make sure that we support them because they are under very difficult times.

There are a lot of other things in the Defense Appropriations bill, whether it is the assistance that provides $50 million for specialized counseling programs to meet the unique needs of military children or whether it is the National Guard's counterdrug program to help reduce the illegal drugs from coming into the United States. Those are areas that are strong for our military.

Let me move over to the Labor-HHS bill. There are so many things that both Chairman Cole and Ms. DeLauro also provided that they worked so hard on; let me just highlight a couple of them.

The Pell grant is so important because we increased the amount by an extra $100. Now the maximum amount is $6,195. You have to have Pell grants so that we can have our young students go off to college.

$10 billion for Head Start. There was a $200 million increase. I want to thank our folks for adding that money.

The Federal TRIO program and the GEAR UP program are moneys that we added.

I certainly want to say thank you also for the $907 million for senior nutrition programs to help our seniors.

The title I grants for school districts, $15.9 billion that we added.

And the last thing I want to talk about is the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, we have increased the funding to provide that type of assistance.

So, again, I want to say thank you to the chairman, to our ranking member, Mrs. Lowey, and all of the staff on both sides, I thank them for a job well done.

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