Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Hurricane Recovery, 2006 - Conference Report

EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS ACT FOR DEFENSE, THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR, AND HURRICANE RECOVERY, 2006--CONFERENCE REPORT -- (Senate - June 13, 2006)

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I come to the floor this evening to talk about the supplemental bill before us. And I thank the Senator from Minnesota for his remarks on agricultural disaster spending. I agree with him how critical this is for his State, and for many others, including mine. And I was deeply disappointed that the administration opposed the Senate's agricultural assistance proposal that was in our bill.

Their letter to us said they opposed it on principle because the 2002 farm bill was designed, when combined with crop insurance, to eliminate the need for ad hoc disaster assistance. Unfortunately, that policy has really harmed us in many of our States. I hope to work with the Senator from Minnesota and others to make sure we recognize these disasters that occurred to our agricultural communities. And I, too, am deeply disappointed it is not part of the supplemental.

Mr. President, I do want to speak for a few minutes this afternoon about funding for the war in Iraq and hurricane recovery and other national priorities.

I want to share with my colleagues that I have three real concerns with the bill. First, really, is that it continues the charade we have had that this war be funded off-budget. And, second, this bill leaves out critical funding for areas such as veterans health care, port security, and emergency transportation assistance on the gulf coast.

Much of the progress we made on the Senate floor, through many hours of debate, was thrown out because of an arbitrary limit that was set by the President that is really going to hurt a lot of our communities.

Finally, I want to talk about how this bill improperly included a budget ceiling that is going to affect every single spending bill and many of the decisions we need to make in the coming months. I believe the supplemental is the wrong place to be enacting a budget that was never passed by this entire Senate. I want to talk about each of these concerns.

I will, like all of my colleagues, vote for this bill in the end because it is important that we provide the funding for our troops to carry out their mission as we have asked them to do and because, of course, it supports the recovery efforts along the gulf coast.

My first concern is that the administration keeps trying to fund this war outside of the regular budget process. Instead of including the money our troops need in the annual budget, they keep sending us supplemental emergency requests. This may seem like a very small issue, but it has two real large impacts. First, every dollar we spend through emergency funding adds a dollar to our national debt. With every supplemental, we are burdening our children and grandchildren with more debt. It used to be that emergency spending bills were for emergencies, things we couldn't foresee such as natural disasters. The need for the funding for the war in Iraq is not a surprise. It is not like responding to an earthquake that no one could predict. We should not hand over to the President the final authority on what deserves emergency funding.

I hope my colleagues will join me in expressing concern about this because this administration's approach is going to burden future generations. I don't think we should hide the true cost of the war from the American public, which we do through this supplemental process.

Communities at home today are sacrificing because of the cuts that this administration and Congress have imposed on the annual budget. If the administration had to fund the war in the annual budget, those cuts at home would be a lot more painful. By funding the war off-budget, Republicans are hiding the true cost of the war and the real tradeoffs that we have to make because of it. I hope the administration will be honest with all of us about how much this war is costing and the investments that we are being denied at home because of the way this administration has chosen to fund the war.

I believe the administration should not have the sole authority to decide what is worthy of emergency funding and what is not because we do have emergencies in our backyard as well as overseas.

My second concern with this bill is that it leaves out many of the critical investments we fought to add right here on the Senate floor to the supplemental. Here in the Senate we worked very well on a bipartisan basis to make sure the bill funds priorities such as veterans health care. I commend Senator Cochran for his work in trying to get this bill through the Senate and working with all of us to make sure our needs were addressed. But, unfortunately, the President set an arbitrary limit for the size of this bill and said he wouldn't sign a bill that cost a penny more. What happened? The leadership rolled over, agreed to the President's limit, and now that is going to hurt our communities at home.

One of the groups of people it is going to hurt the most is America's veterans. In April, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Murray-Akaka amendment to ensure that our veterans get the help they need. Our amendment had broad bipartisan support. We worked with Chairman Hutchison and others to make this funding emergency spending. But what happened? That amendment was removed from this bill. That is a huge setback for the men and women coming home from the war today and entering a VA system that is now overwhelmed and underfunded. This funding would have allowed us to provide soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with timely access to the health care they earned.

We know today that the VA is facing funding challenges. In March, the VA themselves told us that they are seeing 38 percent more Iraqi war veterans than they budgeted for. In fiscal year 2006, the VA expected to provide medical care to 110,000. That number is now rumored to be nearly 170,000. In fact, the VA has treated 74,000 Iraq war veterans in the first quarter of this fiscal year alone. We are hearing that veterans have to wait over a year to get the specialty care they deserve. Some are waiting over 18 months to get their benefits. We have long waiting lists with thousands of names on them at our major VA hospitals. Recently, a VA official actually told us that long waiting lists make care for mental health and substance abuse virtually inaccessible.

I am frustrated that the funding we worked to get on the floor of the Senate for our veterans is no longer in the bill that is in front of us. I believe our veterans deserve better, and I hope that we address this issue again in the near future.

I also want to take some time to mention other investments that were removed from this bill to meet the President's arbitrary limit. I am the ranking member of the Transportation-Treasury subcommittee. I can tell my colleagues that some very important funding initiatives were left on the cutting room floor, initiatives that were sorely needed to help the residents of the gulf and to help that region's economy recover. Let me give an example.

The Senate-passed bill included $200 million in emergency assistance for transit authorities in the gulf region. In prior supplemental appropriations bills, we have included $2.75 billion for the Federal Aid Highway Emergency Relief Program, but there is no such companion program for transit agencies. So right now the principal transit agency in the city of New Orleans is operating on funding through a mission assignment from FEMA. But FEMA has made it clear that this funding support is going to expire at the end of this month. Without any additional Federal help, the very limited amount of bus service that is now being provided is going to be severely curtailed. In fact, I am told that as a result of the $200 million being eliminated during the conference deliberations on this bill, the New Orleans transit authority is likely to be required to lay off between 300 and 450 employees. They are going to have to cut back their extremely limited service even more.

Prior to Katrina, New Orleans had about 62 separate bus routes. By next month, they may have to cut that back to 17. New Orleans is desperate to generate the economic activity that is going to allow this city to again stand on its own two feet. They need workers, including workers who depend on mass transit, to fill all kinds of jobs. Cutting off those transit routes is not going to help that city recover, and throwing bus drivers on an unemployment line is not going to help that city recover.

In Baton Rouge, city leaders are desperate for transit assistance to help them serve the thousands of Louisiana residents now relocated to that city. You can't just add bus service and commuter rail services and expect to cover that cost through the fare box. They have to be subsidized, just like transit services across the country. The city of Baton Rouge never budgeted for these subsidy costs. That city is struggling to provide city services all across the board. They just can't tax all of these new residents. In fact, some of them were left with just the clothes on their backs. I am deeply disappointed that this Congress acquiesced when President Bush chose to ignore all of those needs and draw a line in the sand saying he would veto any bill that exceeded his request.

Because of that demand, the conference was also required to eliminate funding items for the gulf that the President himself requested. Here is why. The President set a limit, and if we wanted to fund anything new that went beyond that limit, the money would have to come out of the investment he requested. And one of those requested items that got eliminated in this conference was a $202 million request for HUD for tenant-based rental assistance. That funding was intended to serve some 44,000 families, including families who had received HUD support prior to Katrina, and homeless families. The bill that passed the Senate expanded the purpose of this money to include the reconstruction and repair of HUD projects in the afflicted region and to provide vouchers for about 4,500 needy citizens in the region, especially the disabled and homeless.

That provision received widespread support from numerous national organizations, such as AARP, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, and Volunteers of America. But all that support didn't matter when it came to cutting billions of dollars out of the supplemental. The end result, the conference report now before the Senate eliminated every penny that the President requested and the Senate included for that activity.

My final concern with this bill is, as I said before, it includes a budget ceiling that is far different from the one that was passed in the Senate. That budget ceiling is going to tie our hands when we work to try to help our communities. This undermines the work we do on the Budget Committee to meet America's needs. I know this was done once before, but I am still very concerned about the precedent we are setting. About 12 weeks ago, the Senate adopted a budget resolution by the narrowest of margins, 51 to 49. That budget included more funding than the President's request. That is because from the floor we did our jobs as Senators. We offered a number of amendments. Some were accepted; some were not. Some were added during the floor on consideration of the resolution.

Here on the floor we adopted amendments to boost funding for Alzheimer's research, for cancer research, for low-income energy assistance, for homeland security, for mine safety, for land and water conservation, and we added funding to help recruit a larger Army to ease the burden on all of those who are now serving. Only after those amendments were adopted was the budget resolution found to be acceptable by the bearest majority in the Senate.

Since that time, the conference committee has made no progress in reaching a final budget resolution for this year. It is this complete breakdown of the budget process that has now brought us to this point.

As Members of the Senate are aware, the budget resolution claims to do many things. But the most significant thing it does is impose a spending ceiling on the Appropriations Committee. Now that the Congress has failed to adopt a conference report on the budget, the decision was made to include a provision in this supplemental conference report we are now considering that imposes a new spending ceiling on the appropriations process. Never mind that there is no such provision in either the House or the Senate bill.

This emergency supplemental conference report now before us includes one small but extraordinarily meaningful paragraph that masks the fact that this Republican Congress has failed to enact a budget for the U.S. Government. Worse still, the ceiling that is included in this emergency supplemental bill is not the same one that was agreed to by the Senate when they barely passed a budget resolution 51 to 49. Instead, the ceiling that is included in this conference report is $9 billion lower than the level the Senate adopted, and $7 billion lower than the ceiling for fiscal year 2008. The ceiling that is included in this bill deliberately ignores the amendments that were adopted by this Senate back in March. So we are basically being presented with a spending ceiling that would wipe out the amendments that were adopted on the Senate floor and bring our ceiling right back down to the level recommended in the President's budget. The Senate already was presented with that ceiling in the resolution that was reported by the Budget Committee. But the Senate amended that proposal many times to add about $16 billion in spending to it, and only then did they find 51 votes to pass it.

I am sorry the spending ceiling is now included in this bill. I don't think it belongs in an emergency supplemental bill for the war or for the needs of the people who live on the gulf coast.

I do want to acknowledge that Chairman Cochran notified us that he would seek to add the deeming resolution to the supplemental. The bottom line is that a new appropriations ceiling does not belong in this emergency supplemental. The Democratic Senators on the Appropriations Committees want to enthusiastically support the appropriations bills that our committee is going to produce over the next several weeks and months. We want those bills to pass on a broad bipartisan basis. We want those bills to address the critical funding needs of the functions of our Government, whether it is health research or education or infrastructure investment or agriculture or the needs of our troops.

In reality, it is going to be hard enough to produce appropriations bills that are going to get broad bipartisan support at the levels we adopted back in March. It is going to be almost impossible to do so if we ignore the amendments adopted on the Senate floor and impose a spending ceiling that was not proposed by the President.

So I am very troubled by this bill. It used to do a much better job of meeting our priorities at home. But the President set a limit and the Republican Congress went along, and I think that is going to hurt the families that we represent.

I will vote for the emergency supplemental because our troops need the resources to do their jobs and the gulf coast needs our help. But I am really deeply disappointed at the missed opportunities that are represented in this bill. We can do better, and I hope we stop the political games and start determining the right direction. Frankly, our troops and our country and our future depend on it.

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