Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008
Floor Speech
CONSOLIDATED APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (Senate - December 18, 2007)
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, as chairman of the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development Subcommittee, I have mixed feelings as I rise to talk about the transportation and housing division of this Omnibus appropriations bill.
This bill is the result of a lot of hard work, and there is a lot to be proud of. At the same time, I regret that over the last month, we have had to strip some $2.1 billion in resources from it. As all of us know, the Omnibus bill before us has a total cost that is slightly higher than the levels requested by President Bush, and much of the press coverage surrounding this bill has highlighted the fact that we have shrunk this bill down to the levels that were requested by the President. But when it comes to the transportation and housing division of this bill, I wish to make it clear to my colleagues that the budget reflected in this bill is not the President's budget. Instead, this bill makes great strides in rejecting President Bush's hardest and harshest cuts in transportation and housing, and it includes critical initiatives that are new that will make important improvements to transportation safety.
I am proud of what this bill accomplishes. It provides funding to hire and train new air traffic controllers, and it rejects the President's efforts to cut funding to modernize the air traffic control system. It responds to our need to address crumbling infrastructure, especially our Nation's highway bridges, and it responds to the worsening congestion our families experience on our highways and our runways.
This bill rejects the efforts by the administration to slash funding that would ease congestion at our airports. It rejects his efforts to push Amtrak into bankruptcy and leave millions of Americans stranded on the platform. And it rejects his attempt to walk away from the needs of millions of Americans who depend on the Federal Government to keep a roof over their heads, including our elderly and our disabled.
Finally, this bill reaches a helping hand to the millions of families who are worried at this holiday season about whether they will be able to keep their homes in the coming year. Millions of people are facing foreclosure on their homes in the coming months as mortgage payments are rising out of control. There are communities in this country where every third home or even every other home is being abandoned by homeowners who cannot make their payments.
This bill addresses that crisis by targeting almost a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure that our families get the counseling they need. This kind of housing counseling can make all the difference for homeowners who are struggling to make payments and to keep their homes. The amount this bill provides for housing counseling is more than 4 1/2 times the level that was asked for by President Bush.
Earlier this year, my very able partner Senator Bond and I held numerous hearings on the most important transportation and housing challenges that face this Nation. Together we negotiated every line of a very complicated spending bill with each other and then with our colleagues in the House. We were able to put together an appropriations bill that was reported, in fact, unanimously by our committee and passed the Senate with 88 votes. We then negotiated a conference agreement that earned the signature of every single conferee on both sides of the aisle on both sides of the Capitol. So we produced a truly bicameral, bipartisan bill.
Unfortunately, even though House Democrats, House Republicans, Senate
Democrats, and Senate Republicans were agreed on a balanced package that did address our transportation and housing needs, the one person who did not agree with us was President Bush. Because of that, we are blocked from sending our Transportation bipartisan bill to his desk for a veto.
Since that time, we have had a couple of very difficult negotiations and, as a result, we have had to strip almost $2.1 billion of funding out of our part of the bill. There are real consequences to those additional cuts on which the President insisted. Transit riders across the country are going to ride in outdated buses because there is not enough money to replace them. Construction of new light rail systems in some of our most congested cities is going to be slow. Discretionary highway programs have been stripped of the dollars that would have been available for national competitions.
Because of the President's demands, we were required to cut matching funds that we were sending to the States to support expanded passenger rail service. We reduced the initial commitment made by our conferees to expand the number of family unification vouchers. That is a program
that provides the necessary housing assistance so foster children and their struggling parents can be reunited in a stable household.
We were required to slow the release of a satellite navigation throughout our national aerospace.
As I said, I have mixed feelings about this bill. We were dealt a very difficult hand by the President's budget demands, and in order to live within those constraints and move forward, we had to make some difficult cuts, and those cuts mean we have had to put off important investments in transit, in highways, and in community development, among many other areas.
Still, I appreciate the work of my colleagues to ensure that this bill rejects the President's worst transportation and housing cuts. Instead, this bill responds to the most critical needs in transportation and housing and makes sure our broken bridges and highways get repaired, that our crowded airports are safe, Amtrak is protected from bankruptcy, and we are protecting our most vulnerable citizens from homelessness.
Finally, I do want to spend a couple minutes on a related subject. In the last few days, the Appropriations and Finance Committees were able to reach an agreement on the way FAA funding will be made available in the future. I am letting my colleagues know, this past fiscal year was supposed to be the year Congress finished important legislation to reauthorize our Federal aviation programs. That included the core authorizations for the operations of the FAA, as well as the agency's procurement budget, research budget, and Federal grant program that are used to improve and expand our Nation's airports.
I regret Congress was not able to make more progress on the legislation this year, but thankfully this appropriations bill now includes a number of important authorities and funding that will keep the FAA functioning and keep the airport and airway trust fund solvent.
This conference agreement extends the current aviation excise taxes until the end of February, and it includes provisions to extend the existing war insurance risk program, as well as third-party liability protections.
The bill also includes funding that rejects the President's proposed cuts to essential air service which guarantees air service to a lot of our rural communities, something about which many of us care. And it rejects the President's proposed cuts to our effort to modernize the air traffic control system and invest in airport infrastructure.
Congress has not been able to finish the FAA reauthorization process in part because of the disagreements among the Senate committees about what their role is in overseeing and funding FAA programs. There are also disagreements about what type and mix of taxes and fees are supposed to be used to fund the FAA. But I am pleased to report that we have now successfully worked through one of those disagreements. Over the last 2 days, the two committees have come to an understanding about how funding for FAA programs will be moving forward.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the exchange of letters between the leadership of the two committees.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
U.S. SENATE,
COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS,
Washington, DC, September 20, 2007.
Hon. MAX BAUCUS,
Chairman, Committee on Finance,
U.S. Senate, Washington DC.
Hon. CHARLES GRASSLEY,
Ranking Member, Committee on Finance,
U.S. Senate, Washington DC.
DEAR CHAIRMAN BAUCUS AND RANKING MEMBER GRASSLEY: We understand that your Committee will convene this afternoon to mark-up the ``American Infrastructure Investment And Improvement Act.'' We write to express our great concern regarding provisions of your draft legislation that would create a new mandatory funding mechanism for the modernization of the FAA's air traffic control system. According to documents distributed by your Committee, your proposal would exempt certain modernization funds from the annual appropriations process and the oversight of our Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies. In our view, such an action would be inappropriate and detrimental to the Congress's ability to review and control FAA spending.
The Committee on Appropriations shares your goal for the modernization of our air traffic control infrastructure with a next-generation system. Indeed, this year, as in past years, our Committee has directed resources to the development of this next generation system beyond the levels sought in the FAA's own budget request. At the same time, however, our Committee has gone to great lengths to highlight and control wasteful programs where the FAA has encountered dramatic cost overruns for systems that are delivering fewer improvements than were originally promised to our Committee and the taxpayer. Unfortunately, such instances are not a rare occurrence at the FAA.
As is discussed in our Committee report accompanying the Transportation Appropriations Act for 2008, fully 25 percent of the FAA's 37 major procurement projects have encountered schedule delays or substantial cost overruns since their initial contracts were signed. Since 2001, the accumulated schedule delays for these programs now exceed 296 months and the associated costs to the taxpayers have grown by almost $1.7 billion. When you compare the performance of these programs to the FAA's estimates at each program's inception, accumulated delays now approach 400 months and cost growth exceeds $5 billion. Innumerable audits by the DOT Inspector General and Government Accountability Office make clear that, while improvements are being made in the FAA's procurement processes, the agency still has a very long way to go before the Congress and the taxpayer can be assured that funding for a next generation system will be spent wisely.
Our Committee is committed to providing that funding but is equally committed to overseeing the agency's efforts to ensure that such funding isn't wasted. Given the FAA's record, we do not see any merit in putting any part of the FAA modernization budget on ``automatic pilot'' and substituting our Committee's oversight role with that of an un-elected ``Modernization Board'' that is not answerable to the taxpayers that are bearing the agency's costs. We believe that efforts to exempt any part of the FAA's funding from annual Appropriations Committee oversight is particularly unwise and potentially wasteful. We strongly oppose such efforts and ask that you revise these provisions before the bill is brought before the Full Senate for debate.
We look forward to working with you this year and in the years ahead to launch a modernized air traffic control system in a manner that is both accountable and affordable.
Sincerely,
Robert C. Byrd,
Chairman.
Patty Murray,
Chairman, Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies.
Thad Cochran,
Ranking Member.
Christopher S. Bond,
Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies.
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UNITED STATES SENATE,
COMMITTEE ON FINANCE,
Washington, DC, December 11, 2007.
Senator PATTY MURRAY,
Russell Senate Office Building,
Washington, DC.
Senator KIT BOND,
Russell Senate Office Building,
Washington, DC.
Senator THAD COCHRAN,
Dirksen Senate Building,
Washington, DC.
Senator ROBERT C. BYRD,
Hart Senate Office Building,
Washington, DC.
DEAR SENATORS BYRD, COCHRAN, MURRAY, AND BOND: We are in receipt of your letter dated September 20th, 2007, in which you cite your collective concern regarding provisions in the American Infrastructure Investment and Improvement Act that relate to the manner in which tax revenues authorized in the Act are provided to the Federal Aviation Administration for its procurement needs. We all share the same interest in modernizing our air traffic control system as quickly and efficiently as possible.
We appreciate your concerns regarding the role of un-elected entities in developing Federal policy, and we believe strongly that Congress should retain its constitutional authority to raise revenue and appropriate funding.
In your letter, you voice your concern that our bill, as drafted, might result in the FAA receiving annual mandatory funding outside of your Committee's control. You also voice concern that provisions of our bill could result in an external un-elected board, rather than Congress, having the authority to make Federal funding allocations to specific FAA procurements.
In order to eliminate any ambiguity regarding these matters, it will be our intention to immediately modify the text of our bill when it either reaches the Senate Floor or is incorporated into any other vehicle so as to ensure that these concerns are addressed. Specifically, the bill will be modified to ensure that no new mandatory funding will be provided to the FAA and that the Committee on Appropriations will continue to retain its current role of determining the final funding level for all programs, projects, and activities within the Federal Aviation Administration through annual and supplemental appropriations acts.
Our national aviation enterprise faces a great many challenges in the years ahead as air traffic continues to grow faster than available capacity. Our Committee is committed to working as a partner with your Committee to ensure that we establish and maintain the safe and efficient state-of-the-art air traffic control system that the American taxpayers want and deserve.
Max Baucus.
Chuck Grassley.
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, the final paragraph of the letter our Appropriations Committee received from Chairman Baucus and Ranking Member Grassley of the Finance Committee states that they look forward to working with our Appropriations Committee as partners in advancing the needs of our aviation system.
As one member of the subcommittee that oversees aviation funding, I express my strong interest in working as a partner with both committees to come up with a bill that fully addresses the future needs of our national aviation system. I hope that important effort will be one of the Senate's first priorities when we reconvene next year.
I yield the floor.
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