Spending Cuts

SPENDING CUTS -- (Senate - December 15, 2005)

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I have traveled throughout my home State of Washington throughout the past month. A lot of people have told me time and time again they want our country to be strong again, and to be strong we need to invest right here at home, in our people, in our infrastructure, and in our communities. But today the Republican leadership is trying to push us in the wrong direction by cutting those critical investments. Republicans today are attempting to interpose an across-the-board spending cut that will hurt our families, it will hurt our local communities, and it will even jeopardize the housing and safety of the American people.

I am speaking out today to explain how those misguided cuts will affect housing for vulnerable families and the safety of every American who plans to fly this holiday season.

I thank Senator Byrd for his tremendous leadership and his speaking out about this misguided Republican plan.

As the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury, the Judiciary, Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies, I am here today to tell my colleagues that an additional 1-percent to 2-percent cut across the board will not be harmless. It will chip away at the Federal safety net that protects our vulnerable neighbors, and it will undermine the safety of our commercial aviation system.

Before I turn to those details, I want to make a broader point about priorities. There is something very wrong with the idea behind these broad, across-the-board cuts. Here is what the leadership in the Republican Party is saying with these cuts: When we need to rebuild in Iraq, we will pay for it out of the Treasury. But when we need to rebuild American cities such as New Orleans and Biloxi, we can only do it on the backs of vulnerable Americans. We can only do it by cutting other priorities at home.

That is the wrong message. It is the wrong priority, and America can do better than that. That Republican idea should offend every American taxpayer who believes that the first and greatest responsibility of our Federal Government should be the well-being of our own people. Nonetheless, that is the position of the Republican leadership in this Congress. As a result, we are now being told that, if we want to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, we have to cut every Federal program across the board, no matter how much those cuts will hurt our safety, our economy, or our security.

Some Senators may try to suggest that a small cut will not have a big impact. I can tell you, as a member of the Appropriations Committee, that is not the case. Let me talk about some of the specific ways these cuts will undermine American families in areas such as transportation and housing and in aviation. I know those areas well because I have worked on them as the ranking member on the Transportation and Treasury and HUD committee.

First of all, these cuts will mean less progress in reducing highway congestion. We will lose more than $720 million in highway construction funds, and with that 34,000 good-paying jobs. Americans will waste more time in traffic, businesses will lose productivity, and our economy will suffer.

Second, those proposed Republican cuts will make life harder for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and for the vulnerable families throughout our country. Hurricane Katrina revealed the harsh truth about poverty in America in 2005. Many people lost what little they had. There are still thousands of victims of that hurricane who are without adequate housing. Some of them are living in tents. Some are still in hotels, wondering when they are going to be thrown out. Others are doubled up with their relatives. And still others have been dispersed all across the country, wondering how they are going to pay for housing when they are earning no income. Neither FEMA nor HUD have done an adequate job addressing the critical housing needs of these Americans.

So here we are trying to address those needs with a supplemental appropriations bill, and Republican leadership is saying if you want to help these Katrina victims, you have to cut housing assistance for other vulnerable families. I think that is the wrong way, to say the only way we will help the victims of Hurricane Katrina is by taking housing away from other needy families. Those cuts would mean that more than 35,000 families will lose the help in housing that they get today through HUD's tenant-based housing assistance program.

Those cuts also threaten to eliminate transitional housing for 1,200 homeless citizens. Think about it. Cutting housing for the homeless, taking help away from 35,000 vulnerable families right before the holidays--that does not reflect my values and that does not reflect my priorities.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, public housing agencies across America opened their doors and sought to make emergency housing available to the citizens who had to evacuate New Orleans. I saw it even in my home State where housing agencies worked hard, thousands of miles away from the gulf coast, to help these families. Most of those housing agencies already had long waiting lists of low-income families waiting for a unit or for a voucher. By accommodating those Hurricane Katrina victims, those housing agencies effectively pushed their own local citizens further down that very long waiting list.

We should not now make it worse by eliminating vouchers for 35,000 families in order to pay for the additional aid for the Katrina victims. We must not come to the aid of victims of Hurricane Katrina by creating still other victims around the country through these misguided cuts.

These cuts will hurt jobs and transportation. They will hurt the homeless and other families who are living on the brink. And these cuts will affect the safety of our air travel in this country.

I addressed the Senate on this issue of aviation safety on October 6, and I did so because I thought it was critical that all Senators understand the relationship between the funding levels we provide to the FAA and the ability of that agency to ensure that the American people are safe when they board an aircraft.

The holidays are upon us. Thousands of American families are going to board planes shortly to gather with their families across America. When they do, they have the right to expect that we in Congress are doing everything in our power to ensure that they will continue to benefit from the safest aviation system in the world.

Yet the reality is that the FAA is facing an unprecedented budget challenge in adequately staffing its air traffic control facilities with fully trained professionals. And the agency is also challenged when it comes to deploying an adequate number of fully trained aviation safety inspectors to oversee the safety practices of our Nation's airlines.

As I explained back on October 6, over the last few years our national aviation enterprise, airlines, airports, and the FAA, have been under an unprecedented amount of financial pressure. We now have no fewer than six airlines in bankruptcy, and that number could grow.

In the interest of cutting costs, airlines have been cutting back on staff, renouncing their pension plans, and outsourcing an increased percentage of their aircraft maintenance.

I know many Senators like me who travel home every weekend have noticed those changes in the services the airlines offer. Staffing is leaner than ever, and flight delays and mechanical problems are on the rise.

Airlines are now contracting out their aircraft maintenance work to third parties, including, my colleagues should know, many overseas vendors who are known as foreign repair stations.

Let me say that again.

Aircraft maintenance work is being contracted out to overseas vendors who are known as foreign repair stations.

In the past, airlines maintained their planes with experienced veteran unionized mechanics. Today, they outsource more than 50 percent of their maintenance work to independent operators. Airlines, such as Northwest, send some of their aircraft as far as Singapore and Hong Kong for heavy maintenance. We have one major carrier, JetBlue, that sends a large portion of its all-airbus fleet to be maintained in El Salvador, Central America. That is where those planes have mechanics that work on them. America West Airlines, now merged with U.S. Airways, does the same thing. This outsourced work needs adequate oversight, and it needs inspection if the American people are going to be safe.

How has the FAA responded to this growing threat to aviation safety? Because of across-the-board cuts in the prior appropriations bills, the FAA has actually downsized its safety workforce by more than 300 personnel, including more than 230 inspectors. That is right. We have gotten rid of more than 230 inspectors, the very professionals who are charged with ensuring that maintenance operations are meeting adequate safety standards.

That was not the intent of the transportation appropriations subcommittee in either the House or the Senate. Indeed, just last year the Transportation appropriations bill provided every penny the President requested for the FAA's safety office. But the FAA still had to drop the number of inspectors because of the across-the-board cut that was imposed by the Republican leadership.

It also resulted from the fact that Congress granted all civilian Federal employees a higher pay raise than the Bush administration asked for, but none of the appropriations subcommittees were given adequate funding allocations to fully fund those pay raises.

Now we know the FAA's inspection efforts are falling short. We have troubling reports today from the Department of Transportation's Inspector General, from the Government Accountability Office, and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Yet despite all those dangers, the FAA had to go ahead and decrease the number of FAA safety inspectors dramatically last year because of those across-the-board cuts. No one can stand up today and say that an across-the-board cut has no impact.

Let us fast-forward to right now, this year. I am very proud to say that the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have worked to address this safety vulnerability. Both committees provided increased funds over and above the levels requested by the Bush administration to bring the number of safety inspectors back to reasonable levels.

In the fiscal year 2006 Transportation-Treasury-HUD appropriations bill that the President signed a few weeks ago, we provided $8 million dollars to boost employment in the FAA safety office by 119 inspectors. That is not going to restore all of the safety inspectors that we lost last year. But it will move staffing in this critical function in the right direction.

But if Congress enacts an across-the-board cut, it will completely eliminate all of the progress we just made in ensuring safety in our skies.

An across-the-board cut that threatens to be included in the final appropriations bill this year could cut the FAA's operations account by over $160 million and then put the FAA's budgetary situation right back where it was. That will require downsizing of the FAA inspector workforce while the critical workload continues to grow.

The situation is almost identical when it comes to the FAA's efforts to avoid the continued attrition in the ranks of our air traffic controllers. It is estimated that 73 percent of the FAA's air traffic controllers will be eligible to retire over the next decade.

In the fiscal year 2006 Transportation appropriations bill just signed into law, we provided almost $25 million to hire an additional 1,250 air traffic controllers. That funding is essential in order to replace the over 650 air traffic controllers who are expected to retire over the course of the next year and to build that workforce back up so we can handle retirements in the future.

Another across-the-board cut this year will completely nullify our effort to hire an adequate number of air traffic controllers. Such a cut will put America's flying public at great risk.

As I said, those across-the-board cuts have a meaningful impact, and they recklessly eliminate initiatives that are critical to the safety of American citizens.

If Senators don't want to take my word for it, they need to listen to the word's of George Bush's FAA Administrator, Marion Blakey. I have had several discussions with her about this topic in the last few weeks. She recently sent me a letter. I will read a portion of it. It says:

Over the past two years, we experienced a net loss of 1,000 controllers and 231 safety inspectors. I don't believe Congress intended that to happen, but that has been the impact of unfunded pay raises.

I am concerned it is going to happen again if Congress adopts an across-the-board reduction in the final bill.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the letter I received from the Bush administration's FAA Administrator, Marion Blakey, be printed in the RECORD.

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