Endangered Fish Recovery Programs Improvement Act of 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This measure offers yet another example of how the Endangered Species Act has put a gun to the head of the West. The unreasonable effect of this law is now impoverishing millions of people across the country. In California communities, it has devastated the agricultural sector of our economy, and it threatens us all with permanent water shortages, skyrocketing food prices, and chronic unemployment.

The measure before us today seeks to spend roughly $40 million through 2023 for research, management, operation, and maintenance and other annual noncapital expenditures in order to keep ESA litigation at bay in the Upper Colorado and San Juan River Basins. It's cosponsored by Representatives of both parties, not because it will produce a single drop of additional water for this region but, rather, because it will forestall additional endless ESA lawsuits.

These programs only exist and only command bipartisan support because these steps are mandated by the ESA under threat of the region losing further access to its own water. And at some point, we're going to have to consider major changes to the ESA before it further depresses our economy, strangles our agriculture, and depletes our Treasury.

Let me offer one of the examples of changes that I think needs to be made. The administration is now pursuing the deliberate destruction of four perfectly good hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River that generate 155 megawatts of the cleanest and cheapest electricity on the planet at the cost to ratepayers and taxpayers of nearly $500 million to tear down. This is to restore fish habitat for a few hundred salmon. When I visited the region a few weeks ago, I asked, If the salmon population was in decline, why don't we just build a fish hatchery? The Macaulay fish hatchery in Juneau, for example, produces 170 million salmon every year. And the answer was, We already have a fish hatchery below the dams at Iron Gate, but the Endangered Species Act doesn't allow us to count the millions of fish that it produces. This is insane.

In this case, it's going to cost us $40 million, according to the CBO, on a program that lacks explicit goals and is running outrageous overhead--22 percent in one case. Now, let me emphasize this: This program doesn't even set specific recovery goals, so there's no rational way of judging success or failure either now or in the future. It is simply a bureaucratic perpetual spending machine.

The good news is, this program does include fish hatcheries, but without any numerical standard for success, their production becomes irrelevant to the program. We're squandering the earnings of our citizens on bureaucratic paperwork and Rube Goldberg contraptions with no rational standard for success instead of investing that money for new water supplies.

This bill continues a folly that our Nation and our economy can no longer afford. I realize that many of the supporters feel that this is the path of least resistance within the current legal framework in order to continue to use the water projects that we've already paid for. Well, that may be the case. But the path of least resistance is destroying our economy, bankrupting our country, and perhaps it's time we took the path less well traveled, the path of common sense.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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