Sam Farr

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, today, with passage of the FY 2012 Military Construction/Veterans Affairs Appropriations bill, we renew our commitment to keep our promise to our nation's more than 2 million military personnel and their families, reservists, and 23 million veterans. I have said it before, but I am proud to note again that this committee has a strong history of working in a bipartisan way to produce a bill that recognizes and supports the needs of our active duty service members and our veterans. The legislation includes a total of $127.8 billion in both discretionary and mandatory funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs--an increase of $8.7 billion over last year's level. In this bill, discretionary funding alone equals $58.3 billion, which is $1.85 billion above the FY 2011 enacted level. This bill also provides full funding of $69.5 billion for mandatory VA programs. Since January 2007, Congress has increased funding for veterans' health care and other services by $30 billion (over 70%). While I would like to give more resources to Veterans Affairs, even in these tough economic times, I am pleased that we are building on the progress made by the Democratic Majority in the last two Congresses. Importantly, this bill also includes provisions to increase spending oversight at the VA--making sure that the VA uses their increase in funding responsibly and appropriately is critically important for our nation's veterans and their families. The bill protects the health and well being of our veterans by preserving the advance appropriations for medical care already provided for fiscal year 2012 and providing the mandatory funding for disability, rehabilitation, education, and housing benefits. This bill also includes sufficient resources to fully implement VA homeless assistance programs, including the Homeless Providers Grant and Per Diem, the Domiciliary Care for Homeless Veterans, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development--Department of Veterans Affairs Supported Housing programs. I commend the Chairman and Ranking Member for their hard work in ensuring that this bill is another significant step in fulfilling the promise our country made to leave no veteran behind. I urge my colleagues to support final passage of H.R. 2055.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. FARR. Madam Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks), the distinguished ranking member of the full committee and an outstanding player in the Rose Bowl from the University of Washington.

Mr. FARR. I yield the gentleman 30 seconds.

Mr. FARR. Madam Chair, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Boston, Massachusetts, Mr. Steve Lynch.

Mr. FARR. Let me say in this moment, in this allocation of time, that it is about values, and I think the big debate here is not just about how you cut, squeeze, and trim spending. We have Members of Congress who have spoken today whose families receive millions of dollars in taxpayer money in commodity payments, in crop payments. We ought to be discussing that. What is the value of funding very wealthy people at the expense of taking food away from poor and starving children? I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I am offering this amendment to move funding from the Agriculture Building and Facilities and Rental Payments account and investing that money in the Organic Data Initiative. Organic agriculture is a very important and growing sector of our farm and ranch community. It has continued to grow at a double-digit rate since Congress passed the Organic Act in 1990. The office collects and disseminates data regarding organic agriculture through the Agricultural Marketing Service, the Economic Research Service, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service. The organic sector should have the same access to data available to all agriculture--a building block to a successful U.S. agricultural economy. As the industry surpasses $29 billion, this information is vital to maintain stable markets, create proper risk management tools, and negotiate equivalency agreements with foreign governments. It is imperative that we continue to collect information gained by ODI. The AMS collects organic prices and disseminates the data through Market News Reports. NASS conducts surveys and collects data used for the Census of Agriculture. The ERS published the consumer survey ``Marketing U.S. Organic Foods: Recent Trends from Farms to Consumers 2009,'' and continues to produce reports which used the data collected by AMS and NASS in addition to surveying Americans about their organic consumption patterns. This amendment is needed for the following reasons: The AMS needs to continue to expand organic price reporting services to more commodities and price points and distribute the data through Market News, creating price stability. The NASS will be collecting more information on organic production in the next agricultural census. It is needed to understand the size of the organic industry and create risk management tools. The ERS is continuing organic economic analysis and expanding to include organic trade data needed to expand export markets. The President's fiscal year 2012 budget requests $300,000 specifically for AMS to continue the collection of and distribution of data. Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment to continue the Organic Data Initiative. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished Member from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, the former ranking member of this committee.

Mr. FARR. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. Madam Chair, how much time do both sides have remaining?

Mr. FARR. How much time do we have remaining?

Mr. FARR. Madam Chair, how much time does each side have remaining?

Mr. FARR. I move to strike the last word.

Mr. FARR. Madam Chair, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. FARR. Madam Chair, frankly, I think that statement is a flat Earth statement because it doesn't even look before you leap. It just says, Let's whack because there's redundancy. There is redundancy in our own body. We've got two eyes, two ears, two arms, and two legs. Why don't we just whack one of them out because you've got the other one. Look at the consequences. ARS is the Agricultural Research Service. Do you know what they do? They look at how we can make a plant structure more healthy, how we can combat the bugs that come in. I represent a county where we have glassy-winged sharpshooters that affect the wine industry. It's a multimillion-dollar eradication program. We wouldn't know how to eradicate it without the research. We have the brown apple moth that infects nurseries, multimillion dollars of attacks. This is a war, just like those disasters you have been seeing on television that are natural disasters. These are natural disasters, only they're small little bugs. Or E. coli that we've talked about. Why would you want to cut the very service that keeps American agriculture healthy and competitive? This amendment wipes out two- thirds of the entire budget. I'm one of those that thinks there's a lot of redundancy in government, but what I do is try to get the agencies together in my district and figure out where they overlap and how we can consolidate them, how we can get them to do joint operations. I think if you want to really consolidate a lot of Federal Government, it's going to take a lot more than just whacking away with an amendment making a list of zeroing out money for economic research for the census for agriculture. That's the last thing we want to do. It's a huge, huge market. You've got to have market information. As I said, you certainly don't want to whack ARS. That's the competitive arm. That's where America stays ahead of the rest of the world. So redundancy is a problem, but it's not always smart just to knock off something because there's more of it, just like your arms, legs, and eyes. I ask for a ``no'' vote. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. FARR. I share your concerns, but I'd certainly like to see what we can do to accommodate my colleague. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. FARR. You know, it's very easy to just go through and start cutting these services because they sound like they're sort of bureaucracy offices, but, in fact, we've been on the committee a long time and we get, you know, oversight of these budgets. We get the Economic Research Service to come before us. And I remember a couple of years ago when they were before us, and I think the committee really got engaged because this is the research service that does the study on the WIC program, what the economic effects are, does the study on the economic conditions of rural America, something that's totally ignored. We've been finding out from them that essentially rural America has been in a recession for the last 10 years, maybe even a depression. So, if you're going to have strategies which are going to include the Federal Government as part of your strategy, it's also going to include local and State government, you've got to have the economic data on which to build those strategies. And I think to just go and take $7 million out of there because you can and get no benefit out of it and hurt what they do, I mean, these services, whether they be the Economic Research, that information is also used in our marketing activity. Now, it's a little bit different than the census stuff that we talked about earlier, but I think that this is really a cut that does a lot more harm than the gentleman who's introducing it intends to do, and I think if he really understood what the full scope of the Economic Research Service was he wouldn't ask that he take 10 percent out of that Department just merely to reduce the amount of money that we're spending. So I oppose this amendment, and I think it does big harm to rural America. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this bill primarily because if it ain't broken, don't fix it. This has been a law for a long time. It allows our committee and the public to know what the A-76 circular review did. The report is on the Department's contracting-out policies and its budget for contracting out, that information, which Congress has been getting year after year without any problems. The language has been in the bill for many years, and we have always received the report allowing the contracting-out activities to proceed. It hasn't stopped anything. The language specifically requires a report to go to the authorizing committee reflecting the agreement reached with the former Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee many years ago. It was his amendment that did this. I have to say personally too that I've done the A-76 circular contracting out. We have a military base in my community, the Defense Language Institute, and the city of Monterey surrounds it. We ended up with an A-76 review, ended up where the city could provide the base operation services much cheaper than the Federal employees on the base, saving the Army about $4 million a year and having much better services delivered. So, again, delivering this report to Congress seems to me hasn't been a problem for anyone. And it ain't broke, so I don't think we ought to support fixing it with Mr. Sessions' amendment. I urge a ``no'' vote. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FARR. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Thank you, Mr. McGovern, for yielding and I rise with concerns with this rule. The rule in one part is good because it's an open rule, allows unlimited amendments, but the rule on the second part, which protects the work of the committee, fails to do so. This committee is about food. It's about food production, about food packaging, about food delivery, and about feeding people. It is the largest poverty program in the United States. We have a lot of poor people in this country of all ages, and instead of taking care of those people, this rule eliminates that protection. It protects those that have but not those that have not. I stand in opposition to the rule.