Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment to save taxpayers money, help the Department of Energy avoid duplicative programs, and to ensure its limited resources focus on programs directly related to its mission to ensure energy security for the United States.
This simple amendment would prohibit the use of funds to be used towards the proposed Climate Model Development and Validation program within the Department of Energy.
The duplicative and wasteful nature of this new program has been recognized by several outside spending watchdog groups. My amendment is supported by the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, the American Conservative Union, Eagle Forum, and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
The committee has recommended no funding for the new climate model development and validation activity in the report. I commend the committee for this recommendation and their work on this issue.
I feel strongly that the full House of Representatives needs to support the committee recommendation and send a strong message to the Senate that we should not be wasting taxpayer resources on new programs that compete with the private sector and should be funded through private investment.
If funded, this program would be yet another new addition to the ever-growing list of global warming programs that have been instituted and funded all over the Federal Government in recent years. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates this administration has already squandered $77 billion from fiscal year 2008 to 2013 studying and trying to develop global climate change regulations.
Consequently, I am very concerned by ongoing efforts by this administration to waste even more taxpayer dollars on new programs for Climate Model Development and Validation.
The President's budget request for this program states:
New investment in Climate Model Development and Validation will enable restructuring the model architecture, new software engineering and computational upgrades, and incorporating scale-aware physics in all model components.
Climate modeling and all of these things are being done by dozens of government, academic, business, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. While research and modeling of the Earth's climate and how and why the Earth's climate is changing can be of value, it is not central to the Department's mission.
Considering the extensive work that is being done to research, model, and forecast climate change trends by other areas in government, in the private sector, and internationally, funding for this specific piece of President Obama's climate agenda is not only redundant, it is also inefficient.
I thank the chairman and committee for their work on this bill, and this issue specifically. This amendment is about effective use of taxpayers' money, and I ask my colleagues to support this amendment.
With that, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is not about making a statement on climate change or the validity of climate science. This is an amendment about fiscal responsibility and efficiency.
More than 50 universities and academic institutions around the globe are engaged in climate modeling. This particular issue has been addressed very well by the academic and the nonprofit sectors with much greater efficiency and speed than any government bureaucracy can ever look at.
The President has already spent $77 billion since 2008. This is on top of the billions of dollars being spent by institutions and organizations around the world. Let's start talking about that.
The Nation is currently $17.5 trillion in debt. The Federal Government spends a trillion more dollars than it takes in.
Fact: more than 50 of the world's leading scientific institutions are already deeply engaged in climate modeling and spending billions of their own dollars on this research.
Fact: Congress must make tough choices to cut duplicative programs in government and get Federal spending under control.
Let's look at these prestigious universities that obviously don't know what they are doing: the University of Colorado at Boulder, Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley.
Mr. Chairman, the last I looked, these are some of the leading institutions in the country, and I think they know a little bit better than the Federal Government.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment to save taxpayer money and get the government out of the business of subsidizing expensive toilet exchanges and upgrades that yield highly questionable returns.
This amendment has support from several spending watchdog groups, including the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, Eagle Forum, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, and Generation Opportunity.
If toilet exchange programs were as efficient as the EPA and Bureau of Reclamation claim, then such products would save consumers so much money and water over time that they would sell themselves in the private marketplace and would not need taxpayer subsidies.
According to the House Committee on Natural Resources, the Bureau of Reclamation's own data show that the agency has awarded a number of questionable grants on these projects since 2005, totaling almost $2 million.
The Federal expenditures spent on toilet exchange programs include a $200,000 grant to San Francisco in 2007 and a $300,000 grant to Texas and California during 2011.
Further, in 2013, Reclamation awarded nearly $210,000 for high-efficiency flush valves to be installed on urinals in one city in California as part of its WaterSMART program, despite the fact that the investment on this project is estimated to save only 123 acre-feet of water per year.
For 2014, the agency wishes to grant funds toward a nearly million-dollar project for indoor water-efficient fixtures and toilet upgrades in California. At the same time, Federal policies have allowed for more than 300 billion gallons of water to be diverted into the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean to protect a 3-inch fish, known as the Delta smelt.
If we are truly concerned about saving water, then we should, instead, invest in new infrastructure and water storage projects, including reservoirs, which would yield significantly higher returns on our investment.
Our country's Federal multipurpose dams and reservoirs provide abundant amounts of water and allow for clean hydropower generation. This infrastructure investment helps provide the foundation for economic growth and long-term job security.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration continues to focus solely on conservation and has actually taken action to reduce water storage capacity--actions which include calling for the removal of four privately held dams.
This defies common sense. We should, instead, have a balanced approach that includes both conservation and storage. Expensive toilet exchange programs are not the answer, and here are the facts and figures about those programs.
Customers are eligible for a $100 rebate for installing 1.28-gallon toilets in exchange for their 1.6-gallon toilets. These new toilets cost between $200 and $500 each.
An average toilet is flushed six times per day, while each federally-subsidized upgrade yields about $7 per year in water and utility savings. Thirty-year mortgages provide quicker returns on investments.
The kicker is these taxpayer-funded toilets are significantly smaller and, in many cases, have to be flushed twice. Furthermore, these government-subsidized toilets are a bad investment, as they eventually leak.
If people are going to spend $200 to $500 on new high-efficiency toilets, a $100 rebate from the Federal Government is not what makes their decisions to purchase the toilets in the first place. At the rate we are subsidizing this program, we may as well be flushing taxpayer dollars down these upgraded toilets.
With this ludicrous return on investment, it should go without saying that these projects are a waste of hard-earned taxpayer money.
I ask you to ponder on the countless ways this money could be spent more wisely, including on investments to increase water storage capacity. This amendment is about the effective use of taxpayer money, and I ask my colleagues to support it.
With that, I yield back the balance of my time.
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