Secure Rural Schools Payments

Floor Speech

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, last week, the United States Department of Agriculture announced that over $300 million would soon be paid out to States through the Secure Rural Schools program in order to compensate for the lost local revenue because of a lack of timber harvesting in national forests.

Last year, the administration decided to retroactively apply 2013 sequestration cuts to the 2012 SRS funds, and it requested the repayment of $17.9 million that has already been distributed to States and counties. This decision immediately sparked bipartisan opposition, prompting the House Committee on Natural Resources to conduct an investigation into the administration's legally questionable actions. The investigation found that the White House ordered the sequestration cuts for the SRS program and that the administration chose to apply the reductions in a manner that made certain that all Secure Rural Schools counties felt the hurt.

Mr. Speaker, I am glad the administration chose against playing more politics with this program at the expense of our rural communities, including those which I represent in the Allegheny National Forest, but in the long run, rural communities wouldn't need additional funding through this program if we actually harvested the proper levels of timber on these taxpayer-owned lands.

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