Additional Continuing Appropriations Amendments, 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I can tell the gentleman that just spoke, the minority whip, a good friend of mine, what we can pass in this House and what our conference will agree to, and that is the $61 million in cuts or $100 million overall that we have already agreed to and already passed. We can pass that in this House.

I have heard that this is no way to run a railroad. My good friend from Virginia said this is no way to run a government. I have heard this is operational outrage. I will tell you the outrage here is that we are having to do this because the former majority, when they had the majority in the House, the majority in the Senate and the White House, failed to pass an appropriation bill. They left the American people in this country with this pile of crap. They should not complain about how we try to clean this up.

Mr. Speaker, by the end of this week, the appropriations subcommittee which I am privileged to chair, the Interior and Environment Subcommittee, will have had 12 budget oversight hearings over the past 3 weeks. That is 12 hearings addressing the fiscal 2012 budget that we will soon be writing.

It is worth noting that we are now 5 1/2 months into the fiscal year 2011, and we still don't have a budget to fund the government through the end of the current fiscal year. The CR we are considering today keeps the government operating for another 3 weeks. And you're right: We need to solve this within this next 3 weeks. The problem is you cannot negotiate with a body across the Rotunda that fails to act. We can't be the only ones at the table. We have to have something to negotiate with. We don't have that.

This CR saves taxpayers $6 billion, including $650 million in spending cuts from the Interior Subcommittee accounts that Republicans, Democrats, and the administration agree are reasonable and supportable on a bipartisan basis. The overall savings achieved through this CR, at a rate of $2 billion per week, is the 3-week equivalent to the $100 billion in cuts achieved in the long-term CR passed by House Republicans several weeks ago.

In the Interior budget alone, we have cut $380 million out of earmarks. We have cut the National Park Service Preserve America Program, eliminated it, and other programs, Save America's Treasures in the National Park Service, programs that the administration did not request funding for in their 2012 budget. So these are things that are agreed on by both Republicans and Democrats.

Now that the Senate has voted down two versions of the year-long CR, the Republican version, H.R. 1, that cut spending by $100 billion and the Democratic version that cut substantially less, it is time for both sides to come together on a funding bill for the rest of this year. The truth is that we really need to get the fiscal year 2011 budget written, passed, and signed into law so that we can turn our attention to next year's budget.

In the midst of the back and forth debate on spending, it is important to remember that these funding bills don't write themselves. Our Appropriations Committee staff have been working day and night, 7 days a week, for months now writing one CR after another, even as they prepare for hearings and study budget proposals for next year.

I encourage my colleagues to support this CR to keep the government open while both parties work to identify an acceptable level of spending cuts for the rest of the year. We can and should cut more from the spending budget, and I encourage my colleagues to support this CR.

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