Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Chair, this amendment eliminates the $155 million of discretionary spending that is wasted on one of the least essential programs in the entire United States Government, the so-called Essential Air Service. That is the program that subsidizes empty and near-empty planes to fly from small airports to regional hubs just a few hours or less away by car.

This was supposed to be a temporary program to allow local communities and airports to readjust to airline deregulation in 1978. Not only is it still going on today, but it has doubled in cost in the last 4 years, from $130 million in 2011 to roughly $260 million in 2015, and $155 million of that is in our control. This amendment zeros it out and puts it toward deficit reduction.

Now, we are often told: Well, don't worry. We have enacted all of these reforms. We have caps on subsidies.

All those caps, $200 per ticket, are only for flights under 210 miles. It continues unlimited subsidies over that distance. Actual subsidies per passenger can be as high as $980 per ticket, paid by hard-working taxpayers. Year after year, we are promised reform; and year after year, the cost goes up and up.

By the way, Essential Air Service flights are flown out of Merced and Visalia airports, serving my district in the Sierra. Trust me, a tiny number of people actually use it. The alternative is hardly catastrophic; it is typically an extra hour's drive to a regional airport. I guarantee you that everybody who hears about this waste of their money is outraged by it.

It is true there are a few tiny communities in Alaska, like Kake's 700 citizens, that have no highway connections to hub airports, but they have plenty of alternatives. In the case of Kake, they enjoy year-round ferry service to Juneau. In addition, Alaska is well served by a thriving general aviation market and the ubiquitous bush pilot.

Rural life has great advantages. It also has some disadvantages, but it is not the job of hard-working taxpayers who choose to live elsewhere to level out the differences.

Now, apologists for this wasteful spending tell us it is an important economic driver for these small airports and airlines, and I am sure that is so. Whenever you give away money, the folks you are giving it to are always better off, but the folks you are taking it from are always worse off to exactly the same extent. Indeed, it's economic drivers like this that have driven Europe's economy right off a cliff.

Two years ago, one Member rushed to the microphone to suggest that this was essential for emergency medical evacuations. It has nothing to do with that. This program subsidizes regularly scheduled commercial service that practically nobody uses. If it actually had a passenger base, it wouldn't need, in effect, to hand out $100 bills to the few passengers who use it.

An airline so reckless with its funds would quickly bankrupt itself. Well, the same principle holds true of governments.

The Washington Post is not known as a bastion of fiscal conservatism, but I cannot improve upon an editorial a few years ago when it said, ``Ideally, EAS would be zeroed out, and the $200 million we waste on it devoted to a truly national purpose: perhaps deficit reduction, military readiness, or the social safety net.''

The Washington Post goes on to write, ``Alas, if Congress and the White House were capable of making such choices, we probably never would have had sequestration in the first place.''

Madam Chair, there are many tough calls in setting fiscal priorities, but this isn't one of them. If the House of Representatives--where all appropriations begin, where the Republican majority pledged to stop wasting money--can't even agree to cut this useless program off from the trough, how does it expect to be taken seriously on the much tougher choices that lie ahead?

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Chair, this is the kindest cut of all. It is a temporary program that was established 37 years ago and has become a poster child for wasteful Federal spending, and I believe the authorization ran out years ago. Our national debt has doubled in 8 years. American taxpayers pay $230 billion a year just in interest costs on that debt. That means if you are an average family paying average taxes, $2,000 of those taxes did nothing more than rent the money that we have already spent.

Continuing to pay for this obsolete and wasteful program with money we don't have is obscene and makes a mockery of any claim that we have cut spending to the bone, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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