Transportation, Treasury, and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, 2005

TRANSPORTATION, TREASURY, AND INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2005 -- (House of Representatives - September 14, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 770 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 5025.

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Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts for his generous yielding of time.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to express my concern about the funding in this bill. I realize the chairman's hands are tied by the allocation given to the subcommittee which is in turn driven by the budget resolution passed by the House earlier this year, but not passed by the Congress. I thank Chairman Young and Ranking Member OBEY for doing the best they could with the limited resources available to this committee, but this committee did not have sufficient funds to meet its responsibilities.

This highlights the fact that the decisions we make about the budget and taxes have real consequences. With this bill today, we unfortunately see one major result of our decisions. We have failed to live up to the commitments we made to our constituents.

I am, however, pleased in certain instances that we have followed the President's recommendation. The FDA consolidation which we are about has been included in the bill, an extraordinarily important effort that a bipartisan effort of the administration and the Congress has pursued. These funds will go a long way in helping to relocate FDA employees from their current substandard facilities into modern, state-of-the-art facilities. The consolidation would bring to an end the practice of extending costly leases for various FDA offices throughout the region. We in fact will save money as a result of this.

On the other hand, I am deeply disappointed that the bill does not provide any election reform grants. We have funded the commission. That is appropriate. We had a press conference this morning with the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State. One of the most important things that remains left to do on election reform is revising the statewide election system of recording registrants and having those registrants available to each and every precinct. The grants that are due under the authorization are not included in this bill.

The administration, in my opinion, Mr. Chairman, must show a stronger commitment to election reform, including calling for more funding, if this Nation is to avoid a repeat of the 2000 election debacle. We will not do anything between now and November 2 with this money; but very frankly the registration that we require in the bill be a statewide system must be online by January of 2006. That is a very brief period of time, some 14 months from now.

And if we do not fully fund the authorization, I fear the States will not meet that deadline. We made a promise to the States that the efforts to address the most serious deficiencies in their electoral systems would not turn into another unfunded federal mandate. By failing to fund fully the commitment of the authorization bill, we have mandated something and we have not helped pay for it.

Also, Mr. Chairman, I remain concerned that the proposed funding for tax law enforcement is insufficient to adequately enforce compliance and make our tax system fair and efficient. I am also disappointed there are no funds to reimburse small airports in the Washington region for the losses incurred when the Federal Government shut them down. I have had extensive discussions with the chairman on this issue. There is some language in the bill that hopefully will make this a conferencable item, but I will tell the chairman once again and I will tell the chairman of the caucus it is ironic that small business people who have invested and taken a risk in being entrepreneurs, as the majority party says it supports, are left hanging in the wind by governmental action and, through no fault of their own, none, zero, find themselves one of the few people who have not been reimbursed for the losses they have incurred. That is, I think, ironic and wrong.

While the bill recognizes that the Department of Transportation should consider ways to reimburse general aviation, the failure to provide funds will only leave small airports, specifically College Park, Potomac, and Washington Executive, dangling on the brink of financial ruin. We should do more for general aviation and small business, what we did for the airlines, large airports, and the insurance industry in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, help ease the burden our actions have caused. Those actions were caused by terrorists.

I urge the chairman to include funds for general aviation reimbursement as we move forward to make fair restitution to the small airports.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, the failure to provide funds for DOT headquarters is short-sighted, in my opinion, and leaves the Department of Transportation headquartered in an aging building with an infrastructure well beyond the end of its useful life. I urge the chairman to correct this oversight, and we ought to look for the resources to do that.

I appreciate the committee's hard work, and I hope we can make some changes and make this a better bill. And I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.