Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, this amendment continues the effort to stop or, at least in this case, to freeze appropriations that are made for agencies whose legal authorizations lapsed many years and even decades ago.
Ever since 1835, the rules of the House have forbidden spending any money for purposes unauthorized by current law; yet today, about one-third of our discretionary spending is for unauthorized programs.
Why is that? Well, it is because the rule against unauthorized spending cannot be enforced because it is always waived by the resolutions that bring these bills to the floor.
The bill before us today contains $25 billion in unauthorized spending for programs that have not been reviewed by the authorizing committees since as far back as 1980, Jimmy Carter's last year in office.
I am sure that some--even many--of these programs are valuable and worthy of taxpayer dollars, but surely others are not. The fact that they have not been authorized in as many as 35 years ought to warn us to at least be a little more careful in continuing to fund them.
Rather than review our spending decisions and making tough choices about spending priorities, Congress simply rubberstamps these programs out of habit, year after year. It is no wonder we are so deeply in debt with so little to show for it.
My amendment does not defund these unauthorized programs, as the House rules require. It simply freezes spending on them at last year's level.
The cuts contained in this amendment total $129 million, or about thirty-six one-hundredths of 1 percent of the total spending in this bill.
This House has a responsibility to examine these programs, reauthorize the ones that work, and modify or end the ones that don't. It has a responsibility, but it has no incentive, as long as we keep funding them and, worse, increasing the funding that these programs receive.
In a sense, this is a token. It is a symbol. Reducing this bill by thirty-six one-hundredths of 1 percent will have no appreciable effect on the $35.5 million in this appropriation or the $3.8 trillion the Federal Government plans to spend this year, but I hope that it will send a subtle but clear message that the Members of this House insist that the Congress reassert its constitutional responsibility to authorize Federal spending and to enforce its own rules that prohibit spending blindly on unauthorized programs.
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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I appreciate the gen tle lady's kind words.
I would point out that this defunds nothing. All that it does is to freeze spending of those unauthorized programs at last year's level until the authorizing committees actually sit down and review them and revise them and reauthorize them. Nor is anything in the NDAA affected by this freeze.
I appreciate my friend from Idaho's sympathy, but I would trade it in a moment for his support. And I would point out that this amendment, the whole point of this amendment is that authorizing committees have got to review, reauthorize, revise, or repeal these measures. They have got to do one of those things.
But why should they, why would they want to go to all of the fuss and bother of reviewing these programs, taking on entrenched interests, asking hard questions, making people cranky in the process, when all they have to do, under our current practice, is sit there, do absolutely nothing, and the funding, just like the mighty Mississippi, just keeps rolling along.
We cannot continue down this course responsibly. We have a responsibility to the American people to do that heavy lifting, to go through these programs with a fine-tooth comb, to make the revisions that are necessary according to our own experience and, in the most important mandate this Congress has been given, to stop wasting people's money.
This measure is a very small step. To suggest that it is going to have dire consequences, cutting thirty-six one-hundredths of 1 percent of the total funds in this bill, is a measure of how out of control our thinking on spending has gotten.
So, with that, Mr. Chairman, I would ask for this single token, that we take a stand and at least freeze the unauthorized spending.
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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is similar to the previous one, except this one requires energy companies of all kinds to fund their own research and development programs rather than continuing to require taxpayers to subsidize their activity to the tune of almost $3 billion. It does not affect the funds set aside for nuclear waste disposal or national defense projects.
For too long we have suffered from the conceit that politicians can make better energy investments with taxpayer money than investors can do with their own money. It is this conceit that has produced a long line of scandals best illustrated by the Solyndra fiasco. This research doesn't even benefit the common good by placing these discoveries in the public domain. Any discoveries, although financed by the public, are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the private companies that receive these public funds. Public costs, private benefit; this is nothing but corporate welfare, and that is what these energy subsidies amount to.
My amendment protects taxpayers from being forced to pay the research and development budgets of these companies. It gets government out of the energy business and requires all energy companies and all energy technologies to compete equally on their own merits and with their own funds.
Last year when we debated similar amendments, we heard of all the technological breakthroughs financed by the Federal Government, from railroads to the Internet. We heard promises of future breakthroughs from this massive expenditure of public funds. I freely recognize that if you hand over millions of dollars of public subsidies to a private corporation, perhaps in Ohio, that corporation will do very well. Some of these dollars might even produce a breakthrough that will then be owned by that private corporation, and then it will do extremely well.
But what the advocates of these subsidies fail to consider is Bastiat's dilemma between the seen and the unseen. We see the politically well-connected company that makes out like a bandit. What we don't see are the sacrifices that struggling families and small businesses must make as these taxes are taken away from them. You don't see small companies struggle by having to compete against their own tax dollars given to their corporate competitors by a doting friend in government. Nor do we see the breakthroughs and discoveries that these dollars might have purchased if they had been made by investors using their own money, making investments based on the highest economic return of these dollars.
Politicians using other people's money make investments based on the highest political return of these dollars. That is the principal difference between Apple Computer and Solyndra or between FedEx and the post office. These public subsidies, in effect, take dollars that would have naturally flowed into the most effective and promising technologies and divert them into those that are politically favored. Dollar for dollar, this minimizes our energy potential instead of maximizing it.
For example, hydraulic fracturing has revolutionized the fossil fuels industry, and it offers us the very real potential of becoming energy independent. After the 1973 oil embargo, the Federal Government spent $1.5 billion on oil and gas production research, much of it on shale production, and accomplished nothing. The government lost interest.
But private investors renewed research with their own money in the 1990s and began producing the technologies that are used in today's boom. Public investment failed miserably; private investment succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. In short, if the technology is promising, it does not need our help; and if it isn't promising, it doesn't deserve our help. In either case, we have no business taking from the earnings of struggling families and small businesses that pay the research and development budgets of big corporations.
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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, I would simply respond to my friend from Idaho that he is right to point with pride to the fact that the Committee on Appropriations has reduced EERE spending by 16 percent. He is certainly on the right track. He is just building a little slowly in that regard.
We want to help him by doing what is right and restoring to the private investors the responsibility of using their own money to research and develop these energy breakthroughs and leave the Federal Government to doing what it does best, and that is staying out and letting the private sector succeed.
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