Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to join my colleague from Georgia (Mr. Broun) to offer this bipartisan and commonsense amendment.

The underlying CJS appropriations bill provides $2.42 billion for the Drug Enforcement Administration's salaries and expenses. That is $35 million above last year's--fiscal year 2014--enacted level and above the President's budget request.

The report says the increase will ``help DEA offset its necessary pay and non-pay base costs'' and will also ``support DEA's growing enforcement workload.''

Again, a mysterious $35 million above and beyond what the agency requested that Congress is adding without any description of where it is even going that means anything besides bureaucratic gobbledygook, as if we have all the money in the world to hand out to every agency above and beyond what they want at a time of deficits, Mr. Chairman, when this body, like the American people, needs to tighten our belts and where we can try to save money. And here is an opportunity to save $35 million.

I have noticed that this same $35 million has been targeted by other Members of this body for their project that is important to their district. Why don't we just add it to the deficit reduction account? What has the DEA done to deserve a $35 million raise when many Americans are not getting raises? At a time when agencies across the board are being asked to tighten their belt, why are we singling out the DEA for receiving funds above what the DEA itself requested in the President's budget?

The DEA has demonstrated time and time again that it can't efficiently manage the resources that it already has. It is diverting funds to ridiculous things like impounding industrial hemp seeds which have no narcotic content, intimidating legal marijuana businesses in States like mine, and wasting money on marijuana infractions that are legal in States where they occur.

If they simply refocus those resources, frankly, Mr. Chairman, we should be talking about cutting their budget to better meet their limited scope. Instead, we are giving them a raise?

Although legal under federal law, the DEA recently seized and impounded harmless, non-narcotic industrial hemp seeds in Kentucky. To be clear, industrial hemp is an agricultural commodity, not a drug. Don't they know this?

In testimony before a committee of this body, DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart refused to acknowledge that drugs like heroin and cocaine are worse or more addictive than marijuana. This is the head of our chief Drug Enforcement Agency? This is the type of thinking that leads to this kind of continued misappropriation of tax dollars.

Examples like these demonstrate that the DEA doesn't have a growing enforcement workload--other than in their own minds--but rather the DEA has simply allocated its enforcement workload in pursuit of misguided priorities. When they should be focused on prescription drug abuses, and on the rising heroin problem, they continue to focus on harmless seeds that have no narcotic content to the point of actually impounding them. Is that what they are using this over $35 million more of taxpayer money for?

This amendment will ensure that DEA will have to tighten their belt just like agencies from DOD to the Department of Education. They have the money they need to complete their mission. We don't need to increase our deficit to fund misguided and misinformed priorities.

I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this simple, commonsense amendment that simply strikes $35 million from the DEA's budget, returns the DEA budget to the same funding levels as 2014 and the same funding levels as the President's budget.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. POLIS. I thank the gentleman from Virginia.

The DEA folks on the ground in Afghanistan deal with opium and heroin production, not marijuana. My remarks were with regard to marijuana.

In addition, with regard to the head of the DEA, she may, in fact, have been a fine line officer and cop on this beat, but she is a terrible agency head, and she has repeatedly embarrassed her agency before this body in committee.

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Mr. POLIS. I thank the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. Chair, very clearly there are two issues here. Why are we plussing up an agency above their own request level for a vague bureaucratic purpose--that is question number one--when other agencies are being cut? That is what this amendment addressed. However, there has been a lot of discussion on the floor about some of the wasted efforts in DIA. I wanted to address the very moving testimony that my colleague from Virginia gave with regard to names of the brave agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency that have given their lives in service to this Nation.

I would like to inquire of him: How many of those whose names he read, who gave their lives, would be alive today, with their families today, if it weren't for the failed Federal policy of prohibition with regard to marijuana?

I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Virginia if he has an answer.

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chair, I would like to know if anybody in this body can answer the question and tell the surviving husband, the surviving wife, a 10-year-old child who lost their father to a failed Federal policy, how many of those agents would be alive today if it were not for the failed Federal policy on prohibition.

Does anybody have an answer?

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