American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Floor Speech

AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (House of Representatives - January 27, 2009)

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Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the ranking member for the time. Everyone on this floor agrees that something needs to be done in terms of stimulating this economy. We all know that we are in difficult times. I also agree with Speaker Pelosi that any stimulus plan needs to be timely, temporary, and targeted.

It is timely. We need to do something. We know we need to do it quickly. Targeted. This would be targeted if your weapon was a scatter gun, because everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown into this appropriation bill.

Temporary? It would take a stretch of the imagination to believe that this was temporary.

Today, President Obama came and spoke with us. He said that he didn't want programs started that had what he called "a long tail,'' and that meant that it contributed to the long-term deficit of this country and that they were going to have to cut in later years.

I will tell you that there is nothing as eternal on this earth as a temporary government program. We all know that. I give you one example, school construction. We are going to start a school construction program. It has never been authorized before, but we are going to start one here. Does anybody really believe that we will then end it after 3 or 4 or 5 years whenever this slowdown in our economy turns around? It will be going on forever. We all know that.

We have a number of programs that have never been debated; I can't remember the exact number, something like 32 new authorizations, that have never been debated in committee. They may be appropriate, I don't know, but we have never debated them to see if they should be authorized and whether they can compete against other programs for the limited amount of money. Well, the unlimited amount of money we apparently have in this bill.

In other cases, the spend-out is 3 or 4 or 5 years down the road. And I would ask you, why are we appropriating money for a program that will spend out money in 4 or 5 years down the road when we all hope that this economy has turned around? But yet, we are appropriating money now for that spend-out. It just doesn't make sense.

Why don't we go through the regular appropriation process to do that? I will give you one example dealing with the National Mall that we have talked about here today.

The Tidal Basin work alone has had huge swings in cost estimates for the very complicated and extensive work. In late December, the Park Service told the subcommittee that the Mall work alone could cost $600 million, and now that number is $20 million. In late December, the Park Service Budget Office told the subcommittee staff that they could use only $15 million to $20 million for planning and design the next 2 years, which seemed honest and logical given the size of the plan. Now, they claim they can spend over $200 million over the next 2 years.

Our problem is that these things should be going through the regular appropriation process, and they are not. And there is a reason that they are not: It is because every idea that anyone has ever had for spending that they think is appropriate has been thrown into this bill to avoid the PAYGO rules. We all know that is the case, and we need to redo this bill and target it.

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