Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012
Floor Speech
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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.
The Acting CHAIR. The Clerk will designate the amendment.
The text of the amendment is as follows:
At the end of the bill (before the short title), insert the following:
Sec. __. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to support any Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative of the Department of Agriculture.
The Acting CHAIR. The gentlewoman from North Carolina is recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, it's very interesting that I came into the Chamber at this time because my amendment also has to do with Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food.
I am very concerned about this program because it is not an authorized program by the Congress. I am very concerned that we have our executive branch off doing all kinds of things that it has no business doing, from fighting wars to running programs that they weren't authorized to run.
This program, in my opinion, conducts duplicative marketing methods by taking funds from programs that already exist within USDA through grants and program management activities.
All of these entities within the USDA already have marketing tools to reach out to applicants in the local community and work with them. Programs that issue grants from USDA would not be affected or lose a single cent of funding from my amendment. Let me repeat: Grants and program management activities from USDA do not lose a cent of funding under my amendment. Rather, it would strike the redundant Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food effort by the USDA to advertise their programs and ensure that the money in the grants and in the program management activities would be spent on the activities that are authorized. My staff has been told by people at the USDA that grant issuing and farmer and consumer programs will continue to operate as normal without this duplicative effort.
Mr. Chairman, there has been a lot of erroneous information put out there in relation to my amendment, and I would like to take some time to clear it up.
It doesn't affect any USDA grant or program management funds already existing because Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food does not issue grants. Nor does it manage any programs. But it is a circumvention of the authority and defeats the intent of Congress when we are the ones who should be authorizing programs and budgets. So I think that this is a program that we do not need, and I believe that it should be abolished, because when the USDA wants a program, it should be coming to the Congress to get authorization for that program.
There is a specific violation against establishing a program in the authorization that would have set up slush funds in the Secretary's office, and I think this is similar to that. It allows the department to take money from existing programs, put it into this program, and spend them the way that they wish to, and I don't think that is an appropriate expenditure of funding that we have authorized.
Therefore, I urge passage of my amendment.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. FOXX. I want to thank my colleague from Texas for yielding to me, and I want to respond to our colleague from California.
I am not afraid of a program. I am afraid, as my colleague from Texas has indicated, of the executive branch continuing to overstep its bounds and develop programs that have no authorization and do the things that it has no business doing without authorization from Congress.
I find it interesting that my colleague would bring up the fact that we went to war without authorization. I believe that was his President who did that, and I voted resoundingly not to do that.
I also want to sympathize with my colleague from California. I am certainly doing my best to lose weight, too. I think it is a struggle that most of us, particularly in this body, have. But I can tell you that I am not looking to the Department of Agriculture to give me my nutrition information. I know how to find that nutrition information, and I think most Americans know how to do that, and we don't need a special program in the Department of Agriculture to do that.
We have got to commit to bringing government spending under control, and we are going to do everything that we can. While no money will be cut from the appropriations by this amendment, it removes a program that is not authorized that gives part of the Department of Agriculture an argument for why they need money.
I think that in many cases what happens in these executive branch departments is that when their own entity begins to lose its need for being, they begin to look out there for, What is the latest trend? What can we do in this Department to justify our existence? I think that that is what happens in many, many cases, and you get the continuation. As Ronald Reagan said, the nearest thing to immortality is a Federal Government program, and I think that is what happens in many departments, not just the Department of Agriculture.
I have great respect for much of what the Department of Agriculture does, and I think it is providing vital services in many areas. But, again, this is not an area that we need the Federal Government to be involved in. We don't need this program.
Frankly, my colleague asked me what I am afraid of the program for. What I don't understand is why our colleague from Maine doesn't want reporting from this program. He didn't ask her that question. Why is she concerned that we ask for reporting mechanisms? Because we have asked the Department, How much money are you spending on this program? They cannot answer. What effect are you having? They cannot answer. There are no results. There is no cost-benefit analysis.
It is time that any program that says, We can't tell you how much we are spending; we can't tell you what we are doing; we can't tell you if we are having any effect, to be done away with. And any program that answers a Member of Congress that way should be immediately eliminated.
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