Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. PERRY. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank the chairman of the committee for allowing me to offer this amendment. It prevents the Department of the Interior from competing with our local job creators in the use of UAS--unmanned aerial systems--for land surveying, mapping, imaging, and remote sensing data activities.

There is concern that agencies like the USGS and the Bureau of Land Management are acquiring the UAS and utilizing them on projects that can be accomplished by the private sector. We have no problem with them using them. We have no problem with them using them for forest fires and those types of things, for emergency situations, but where local businesses can do this work, we think that it is unfair for the government to take that work away.

Having the Department compete with local employers results in a loss of business for private geospatial firms under contract to other Federal mapping agencies. The government is actually getting a leg up on the private market by obtaining Certificates of Authorization, or COAs, and performing services with UAS that are otherwise commercial in nature.

Current law and regulation permits private citizens and firms to operate UAS for a hobby. However, there is no effective enforcement to prevent government abuse of such authority for commercial purposes.

The fact that government agencies can operate a UAS while the private sector cannot as freely or timely gain airspace access has created and uneven playing field. Allowing the Department of the Interior to compete with the free market use of UAS is not only poor stewardship of taxpayer money and inefficient use of resources, but results in the government duplicating and directly competing with private enterprise.

This is a $73 million marketplace, Mr. Chairman. It drives more than $1 trillion in economic activity. More than 500,000 American jobs are related to the collection, storage, and dissemination of imagery and geospatial data. Another 5.3 million citizens utilize such data. As much as 90 percent of the government information has a geospatial information component. Up to 80 percent of the information managed by business is connected to a specific location. The geospatial marketplace is identified by the Department of Labor as one of just 14 high gross sectors in the United States workforce.

With that, I urge support of this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. PERRY. I appreciate the gentlewoman's comments.

First of all, I did state that fire observation would not be included. Indeed, it is not written in the amendment. It is very specific. So for emergency purposes, if need be, the Department of the Interior still can use, whether it uses its own or DHS' or one of the other myriad agencies that have the vehicles, it still has the ability to do that.

But I would also remind the gentlewoman that there are plenty of ambulance services and other emergency services for contract hire out there in our communities that perform emergency services every hour of the day, every day of the year. That fact notwithstanding, the private industry does provide all the other things that the agency is currently embarking on on its own and leaving the private sector out.

A friend just called me today and asked me, because I am a helicopter pilot in the Army, if we could put his air-conditioning unit on a roof. I said, ``Absolutely not.'' The Army doesn't do what the civilian world does for good reason. We want the civilians out there doing those things. We don't want to compete as the Federal Government.

But in this case, the Department of the Interior is competing directly, and will continue to do if allowed to do so, unless prohibited. They can write contracts, and they can have somebody on call. If there is an emergency situation, they can have a contractor on call to do that, and they should.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. PERRY. Again, I appreciate the gentlewoman's reservations and opposition for the reasons so stated. I respect them, but I feel this is the correct place to limit in the appropriations, to make sure that the private sector can compete effectively and is allowed to do so and doesn't have to compete against the Federal Government with all the provisions it has at its hand to undermine their ability to be effective and competitive.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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