Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014

Floor Speech

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, first, let me commend the Senator from Louisiana for his amendment. It would restrict criminals who have been convicted of certain violent or sex crimes from receiving housing assistance through HUD's public housing choice neighborhood and tenant- and project-based section 8 programs.

Public housing authorities and private property owners who provide assistance under these programs are already required under Federal law to deny admission or assistance to individuals who are subject to lifetime registration on a sex offender registry under a State program. However, when you move to the next stage, strangely enough, it is discretionary.

Under current law, prior violent criminal activity may be grounds for the denial of assistance for public housing and the section 8 programs, but it is not required to be grounds to deny that kind of assistance. That is exactly the point that Senator Vitter is trying to make. So his amendment would tighten the current law to make it very clear that under certain categories--aggravated sexual abuse, murder, and murder in the second degree, sexual exploitation, and other abuse of children and violence against women--individuals convicted of those crimes would not qualify for public housing assistance under the programs that I have mentioned.

As Senator Vitter said, this is a commonsense amendment. It will help to make housing safer for the law-abiding citizens residing there. He has targeted serious crimes, and I think his amendment should be adopted. I am going to support the amendment, and I will be urging its adoption.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.

The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, one of the issues and questions that have been raised by many of my colleagues about this bill is that at first glance it appears to be higher than the President's budget request for these two departments--Transportation and HUD and the related agencies--and I want to explain why that is. It is a very legitimate question, but it has a very good answer.

The answer is the President's budget for the agencies and departments under our jurisdiction is artificially low because it relies on gimmicks, and it relies on scoring differences between CBO and OMB. Let me explain just a couple of areas where it will become evident to my colleagues why the difference exists and why the President's budget submission actually is not less than the bill that is on the floor now, if true budgeting principles and accounting were used.

First of all, the President's budget proposes to shift $2 billion in existing discretionary programs to mandatory in order to appear to achieve savings, including $1.5 billion from Amtrak's operating capital and debt service grants and $450 million by removing large hub airports from the Airport Improvements Program.

In addition, the President's budget request assumes an increase in the passenger facility charge at airports from $4.50 to $8.00. Well, we have seen this movie before. When the FAA authorization was being considered just last year, Congress rejected this fee increase. There is no reason to believe it is going to be accepted now. Yet that is built into the President's budget assumptions. We have seen him do this on a host of tax issues too, so this is not unknown for this administration.

There is another area I think is highly significant. The President's request for section 8 project-based rental assistance is insufficient to fully fund existing 12-month renewal contracts with the private property owners who participate in this program. In fact, it is about 10 percent short of the amount the administration knows is going to be needed to renew these contracts for the full 12 months of the fiscal year. That is about $1.2 billion short. That is about half of the difference we are talking about between the President's budget request and our bill.

Surely, it is not responsible to assume that somehow we are not going to pay these private property owners who are participating in the project-based section 8 program for the full year of rental assistance. It is not going to stop after 10 months. They are not going to be evicting their tenants who are receiving the subsidy.

So true and accurate budgeting would have required the President to put $1.2 billion into his budget request for this program.

Finally, CBO scored FHA receipts--the fees, the mortgage insurance premiums--at $1.8 billion below OMB's score, which increased the cost of maintaining the existing level of services in our bill.

We know there are disputes between CBO and OMB all the time. In this case, I am not suggesting that it is a gimmick, as in the other two examples I have given. I am suggesting there is an honest difference of opinion. But the fact is, whether we like it or not at times, we are bound by CBO's score, and CBO's estimate of those FHA receipts--those fees, those mortgage insurance premiums--is $1.8 billion below OMB's score. That is quite a difference.

So if you add up those gimmicks, with the Amtrak program moving from discretionary to mandatory, the assumption that Congress is all of a sudden just months later going to change its mind on the passenger facility charges and nearly double them after rejecting that idea just months ago, the failure to fully fund the project-based section 8 rental assistance, and the difference between CBO and OMB--the genuine dispute on FHA receipts--if you add all that up, it is not accurate to say our bill is $2.4 billion above the President's request. What we employed was CBO's estimate. We got rid of the gimmicks, and we used honest budgeting, and that accounts for the difference.

I hope my colleagues will not be misled into thinking that somehow this bill is above the President's budget request. When you apply honest accounting principles and take into account the $1.8 billion difference between the scoring of CBO and OMB, it is obviously not different. In fact, I would argue that we are under the President's budget request.

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