Supplemental Appropriations

SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS -- (Senate - June 15, 2006)

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, the Senate is going to be considering in just a few minutes the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act. I do want to be clear that like most of my colleagues, I will be voting for this bill because it does provide the funding for our troops that is critically needed to carry out their mission and because it supports recovery efforts along the coast. I do wish to express three concerns I have with the conference report.

First, this bill continues the charade that this war should be funded off budget. Instead of including the money our troops need in the regular budget as requested by the President and sent to us, we keep getting sent emergency supplemental requests. It is clear to me, having been here for 13 1/2 years, that emergency spending bills used to be for emergencies, things we could not foresee such as natural disasters. The need for funding for the war in Iraq is not a surprise. It is not like responding to an earthquake or tornado. By funding the war off budget, I fear we continue to hide the true cost of the war. It is imperative that the Senate and the House get a budget from the President that gives us the true cost of what we need to be funding.

In addition, the administration should not have the sole authority to decide what is worthy of emergency funding and what is not. We have emergencies in our backyard as well as overseas. We should not hand over to the President the final authority on what deserves emergency funding.

The second concern I have is that this bill leaves out very critical funding for areas we considered and adopted in the Senate. They were removed once the bill went to conference. Funding for health care, for port security, emergency transportation assistance in the gulf coast--much of the progress we made in the Senate was thrown out. Why? To meet an arbitrary limit set by the President. That is going to hurt many of our communities in the coming months.

Part of what we did in the Senate in April was to overwhelmingly pass the Murray-Akaka amendment that ensured our veterans would get the help they need. That amendment had broad bipartisan support on the Senate floor. It was removed in conference in the middle of the night. That is a huge setback for the men and women who are coming home from the war today and entering a VA system that is overwhelmed and underfunded. In March, the VA told us they are seeing 38 percent more Iraqi war veterans than they budgeted for. Veterans now have to wait a year to get the specialty care they deserve. Some are waiting more than 18 months before they get the benefits they have been promised. On top of that, we have waiting lists that are thousands of names long at major VA hospitals. I am frustrated that the funding we secured for America's veterans is no longer in the bill before us. Our veterans deserve better.

Funding was also removed for emergency transportation relief in the gulf. In the Senate, we passed $200 million in emergency assistance for transit authorities in the gulf region. FEMA, which is helping to fund transit service in New Orleans, is going to stop the funding for that at the end of this month. That is going to force New Orleans to cut back transit service even more. Cutting off transit routes is not going to help our gulf coast cities recover. Throwing busdrivers on unemployment lines is not going to help them recover.

Another item cut from the legislation was tenant-based rental assistance for the gulf. That funding was intended to serve about 44,000 families, including families that received HUD funding prior to Katrina and many homeless families. The bill we passed in the Senate expanded the purposes of that money to include the reconstruction and repair of HUD projects in the afflicted region, many of them damaged considerably. It provided vouchers for about 4,500 needy citizens in the region, particularly the disabled and homeless. That funding is now gone, and we are going to see some pretty vulnerable families in the gulf coast without any ability to stay in the homes in which they currently are trying to stay.

Finally, this bill improperly includes a budget ceiling that is going to affect every single spending bill we do this year. I believe the supplemental emergency spending bill is the wrong place to enact a budget that never passed the Senate floor. It is going to be hard enough to produce appropriations bills this year that will get broad bipartisan support at the levels the Senate approved back in March. It will be almost impossible to do so if we ignore amendments adopted on the Senate floor and impose the spending ceiling proposed by the President that is now included in the bill.

I am frustrated that the administration keeps funding this war off budget. I am frustrated that critical investments which we approved in the Senate were removed from the bill. I am very frustrated that this bill is now going to result in our hands being tied throughout the appropriations process. I hope in the future we can do much better.

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