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

Floor Speech

Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, later this afternoon, Senator Toomey will be offering a motion to recommit the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill back to the Appropriations Committee. While I commend Senator Toomey's goal of ensuring that the fiscal year 2014 spending levels comply with the Budget Control Act spending caps, I do not believe this is the right approach.

Let me be clear. I voted in the Appropriations Committee, as did every Republican member of that committee, for a top-line level of $967 billion. That is the amount that is in the Budget Control Act. That is law. But this is the very first appropriations bill that has been brought to the Senate floor. We have no idea where we are going to be at the end of the process.

The two leaders of the Appropriations Committee have called for regular order, and I commend them for bringing appropriations bills to the floor starting with this one, one at a time, for debate, amendment, and full consideration. We have had many amendments filed to this bill. Several of them would reduce spending that is in this bill. One reduces spending by $50 million for the HOME program that is being offered by the Senator from Arizona. There is another that reduces spending by over $1 billion for the Community Development Block Grant Program. That is not a cut I happen to believe should be made, but that is a legitimate amendment that, if it passes, would reduce spending in this bill by $1 billion. There are other amendments that have been proposed to reduce spending in this bill.

So this is turning the process upside down. It is recommitting to committee a bill before we have had the opportunity to determine what the final spending level in the bill is even going to be as a result of the many amendments that have been filed. Furthermore, we are not going to know if we have reached the cap until we finish all of the appropriations bills.

I realize my Democratic colleagues want a far higher spending cap than I do and that the Budget Control Act provides, but I don't think we should short-circuit the process when there has been a good-faith effort to bring appropriations bills to the floor.

What I would propose in lieu of the approach offered by my friend and colleague Senator Toomey is an amendment which I am going to file this afternoon that says not later than October 1, the Committee on Appropriations shall revise the suballocations to the subcommittees for fiscal year 2014 such that the suballocations comply with the discretionary spending limits that are in the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act--what we refer to as the Budget Control Act, the BCA.

To me, this is the proper way to do it. If, at the end of the fiscal year, we find that the appropriations bills that have been passed exceed the statutory cap in the BCA, then we should reopen the process and reallocate the funds--the ceilings, the caps--across each of the subcommittees and produce bills that comply with the law.

Frankly, since current law applies this cap anyway, if we don't do that, sequestration will take effect on January 1 of next year. I do not think that is a good approach because it treats all programs as if they are the same and does not allow us to set priorities.

So I think the approach of the Senator from Pennsylvania is premature, a blunt instrument, and there is a reasonable alternative. I think it discourages a return to regular order where we bring the appropriations bills to the floor and where Members are free to eliminate whole programs, to cut billions if they wish to do so. Indeed, Members have worthwhile amendments that would reduce spending, but to send the bill back to committee before we have even had a chance to consider those amendments and before we have allowed the Senate to work its will is, to me, completely upside down of the way the process should work.

Furthermore, I will make the point once again that this is the first appropriations bill. How can we say the cap is breached when it is the very first bill to be brought before the Senate? Frankly, having gone through this process where we did have a freestanding Transportation-HUD bill and Senator Murray and I went to conference with our House counterparts, we came back with a consensus bill that became law that was in between the amounts in the Senate bill and the House bill. So we ended up at a lower level, which we knew we would, and which I will not feel I am going out on a limb in predicting we would in this case as well, since the Senate bill is higher than the House bill.

Why can't we let the process work? Why can't we consider the amendments that have been offered, some of which may well pass and reduce spending? Why can't we go to conference with the House where I believe additional cuts are probably likely? And why can't we let the appropriations process unfold the way it should? Why should we short-circuit it now by saying, that is enough, let's return the bill to committee, we don't trust what is going to happen, when there are safeguards we can put in to ensure that at the end of the day we will be at the cap of $967 billion?

As I said, I will file my amendment this afternoon to give us an actual mechanism to ensure that at the beginning of the fiscal year we are at those levels. That is one approach, and I think it is a far better approach.

Thank you, Madam President.

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