Ernest Istook

Mr. ISTOOK

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver).

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ramstad).

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. I want to repeat my opposition to this amendment. I think Members recognize that private debt collectors sometimes behave in an abusive manner. I think we also realize that sometimes government debt collectors sometimes behave in an abusive manner. It is not a question of whether that person is employed by the government or in the private sector, it is the question of whether that person is a responsible individual that is well-trained and is handling themselves with integrity. That can be just as true in the private sector as in the public sector. Many States already use private debt collection and have seen their rate of collections increase because of that. The Federal Government already employs private debt collectors to assist in collecting other Federal debts. For example, student loans that involve sensitive personal and financial information, that is done successfully as well. The amendment is not only something that opposes something which I think is a promising opportunity, but it is also unnecessary because current law does not permit the IRS to hire private debt collectors. Therefore, the amendment really accomplishes no change from the current law and is unnecessary. I oppose the amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. ISTOOK. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I would like to be clear for the record and inquire of the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake), this means the gentleman is not offering the Flake amendment either at this time or at any later time?

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that the pertinent portion of the existing unanimous consent agreement be amended accordingly to indicate the Flake amendment will not be considered.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan).

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht). (Mr. GUTKNECHT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. I fail to understand how anybody is threatened by opportunity. When people say I want to keep the type of health plan I already have, they still have that option. They are not hurt by saying they have the options they have already and they have a new option; if they do not want it, do not take it. If somebody else wants it, let them take it. Why do we want to shut it off? That is what the Moran amendment is all about, shutting off opportunity, telling people that if they do not like any of their current options, too bad, they do not get any other choices. The Office of Personnel Management has acted in a responsible manner to expand choices for people. We should let it happen. We should not have a knee- jerk reaction from people who feel threatened, for what reason I do not know; but there is no reason to fear what is going on here. We should reject the Moran amendment accordingly. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sam Johnson). (Mr. SAM JOHNSON of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson).

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan).

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This is a simple housekeeping amendment. As we noted yesterday, the various points of order that were raised would have the effect of increasing the amount of spending in the bill beyond our subcommittee's allocation. This amendment simply brings the bill back within our allocation pursuant to our 302(b) allocation and with what we told the House before. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. I will be brief on this because I do not think this amendment does any damage, and I will not oppose its adoption to our bill. However, I think it is a mistake to pretend that it accomplishes anything. I know of no serious effort to change the definition of manufacturing that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) wants to make sure that we do not. But I do think it is important to address some of the other things that he mentioned. For example, if we look at the fast food sector, typically, most of us see the counter. And maybe we get a glimpse into the kitchen behind it. Maybe, sometimes, we are there when a large semi truck pulls up to deliver some of the product that is involved in there. But there is a lot more that we do not see. For example, let me tell you about Lopez Foods, a minority-owned business in Oklahoma City. Lopez Foods is one of the principal suppliers to McDonald's. It is a part of the fast food industry, but we do not see it when we are in the restaurant. If one visits their facility, one will see that it is a large, modern, clean facility, and it is filled with high-tech. You would not believe the kind of computer systems and mechanical systems that are necessary for the quality control to make sure the ingredients are in the same universal proportion for the product that is going to be shipped to McDonald's all over the country. We do not see that in the fast food sector. It is a very different image from that of the smiling, young person or perhaps senior citizen that may be waiting on you on the other side of the counter. We need to understand that every sector, fast food included, has a supply chain. It has a logistics chain that is a part of that industry the same as the person who waits on you is a part of it. We need to understand that and realize that there are a lot of contributions to the economy of the United States of America that come from the restaurants that are sometimes demeaned with the term fast food, but it should not be considered a term of lightness at all. So we will not oppose the amendment, but I certainly do oppose some of the characterizations that we heard earlier on it. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, as the gentleman is well aware and the gentlewoman is also, of course, the Department of Transportation, which is within the jurisdiction of our subcommittee, no longer has jurisdiction over transportation security issues. That is with the subcommittee that oversees the Department of Homeland Security. I know that the gentleman from Kentucky (Chairman Rogers) is diligently reviewing this issue with the Transportation Security Administration and will be attentive to the comments that need to be referred, as the gentleman mentioned, to him. The gentleman opines that perhaps we might be a part of the same package bill. I do not know that that will be the case, but I do know we will be in communication with the gentleman from Kentucky (Chairman Rogers).

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I move that the Committee do now rise.

Mr. ISTOOK

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the order of the House of yesterday regarding further consideration of H.R. 5025 in the Committee of the Whole be amended to strike any provision for the amendment by the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake) regarding Cuba.

Mr. ISTOOK

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the further consideration of H.R. 5025, and that I may include tabular material on the same.

Mr. ISTOOK

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 5025, making appropriations for the Departments of Transportation and Treasury, and independent agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, and for other purposes, and that I may include tabular material on the same.

Mr. ISTOOK

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I am pleased to present to the House the appropriations bill H.R. 5025, making appropriations for the Departments of Transportation and Treasury, and independent agencies for fiscal year 2005. Mr. Chairman, this is one of the most fiscally responsible bills that we have considered this year. It is a large bill. It is a diverse bill. It includes funding for the Department of Transportation, the Treasury Department, the General Services Administration, the Executive Office of the President, National Archives, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Personnel Management and many other agencies that are critical to the functioning of our Federal Government. This measure is also one that includes a number of government-wide general provisions that are there to facilitate efficiency and effectiveness in the day-to-day functions of large and small Federal agencies. Mr. Chairman, we have a lot of budget constraints this year. In examining the budget picture for this particular bill, it is important to note that this bill is within the budget that has been produced by this House of Representatives and the allocation that has been provided to this subcommittee. Of course, the Congress, working with the President and his administration, has rightfully put a priority on spending for the ongoing conflict in Iraq and the war on terror. At the same time, we have a serious Federal deficit. These have forced this body and our Committee on Appropriations and our subcommittee to make many difficult and challenging choices. This bill reflects the difficulty of those choices. In fact, if you look at this bill, Mr. Chairman, and compare it with last year's parallel bill, you will find that this particular measure is $3 billion below the amount that we spent on the same accounts last year. There are reasons that it is not a pure apples-to-apples comparison, but, nevertheless, the bill is below what the similar funding was for last year. That reflects, again, the priority choices and the tough choices we have made. So we will hear, during debate upon this measure, many people say, ``Oh, I wish we had more money for this program or that or some other.'' But the answer is that we do not. We are in deficit spending already, and this is about as fiscally responsible a bill as you will find before this body this year. Overall, the bill provides a total of $89.9 billion for the Department of Transportation, for the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, highways, transit, rail programs, seafaring programs, and the heart of the executive branch, including the White House itself. Overall, for salary and expense accounts, the bill does provide increases, some 2.6 percent, but that is within the context of a bill that overall is $3 billion less than the bill last year, so many agencies will have to do some belt tightening. We have tried to give them the maximum flexibility to manage those resources. I appreciate the fact that the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Young) did not have the funds he would have liked to have had to put into highways and other forms of transportation, but he gave us a fair allocation and I am grateful for it. Not only is it $3 billion below last year's spending on these accounts, it is below the amounts requested by the President in his budget. There were some highly controversial provisions we did not include. Some Members said if you can put a provision in the bill to end a process known as dumping, which has to do with reparation payments to industry to offset unfair trade practices, then you can grab over a billion dollars to put back into the bill. That would not have been good because whatever Members' position on dumping is, it has not passed the House and we cannot assume we will have the money. Despite the budget constraints we have, I am pleased we have been able to improve the most important part of our transportation network, and that is funding for highways. The $34 billion in this bill for highway funding is a billion dollars above the funding level for highways last year. So in the context of a bill that itself is $3 billion below last year, when we are still able to improve highway funding, that shows we have addressed priorities and tried to put the money where it is most important. That money for highways is going to be good news for the economy because each billion dollar investment is estimated to create some 40,000 jobs. There is also some confusion in the context of this bill, Mr. Chairman, because we have a two-stage process. We have still pending in the conference committee a surface transportation highways and transit reauthorization bill. I do not want to confuse this bill with that. The reauthorization bill establishes a framework for spending transportation dollars, but this bill actually provides the money. We do not have a new framework created, so we have had to assume the old framework remains in place, but we are going to have some controversy over that because we have not been able to achieve passage into law of a highway reauthorization bill. We have some technicalities, some rules of this House, and I know many Members are going to come forward and raise points of order. They are going to say you have to strike this part out of the bill because we have not authorized it. Well, we have been waiting a year for an authorization bill which has not happened. We had to do our work anyway. Some Members may want to pick the bill apart and say you are putting money into something that is not authorized. Under the rules of the House they may be successful in doing that. But I want to reassure every Member of this body that we are going to repair those things when it gets to conference. We are going to have the same kind of responsible bill that the Committee on Appropriations has produced that comes out of conference regardless of how Members may want to pick at it with parliamentary tactics on the House floor today. It is not the fault of the Committee on Appropriations that a reauthorization measure has not passed as the rules of the House dictate it should have been a year ago. Looking at some other details of the bill, the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, will receive a 3 percent increase for its operations, less than they requested, but more than the government-wide average for nondefense, nonhomeland security programs. That again is because we have put priority into aviation funding, just as we have in highway funding, and we have put cuts in place elsewhere in the bill to compensate for that. The bill meets the aviation funding guarantees mandated by authorizing legislation which has passed this body. It provides the budget request for the capital investment programs of the FAA and grants-in-aid for airports all across America. The essential air service program, which I am not personally fond of, but one which is important to many Members of this body, receives the same funding as it did in fiscal year 2004. And there is $20 million for the small community air service program. Amtrak is always a point of controversy in this House. The bill proposes $900 million for Amtrak, the same amount suggested by the administration in their budget proposal, and I believe it is a responsible number for Amtrak because Amtrak still has not resolved its long-term problems, and we have not developed the kind of partnerships that we need with States and communities that want Amtrak service investing in Amtrak service. The administration believes and I agree that realistic Amtrak reform has to be enacted before we start putting more money into that passenger rail service. The Secretary of Transportation and the President and his administration believe the amount in this bill is sufficient to keep that rail service operating in the next year, and I agree with them. Funding for transit in the bill is essentially at the level of fiscal year 2004, also the same as the administration requested, but we have done some adjustment inside of the numbers. Within the overall total, we have put more of the transit funding into the formula grant program that goes into every community in every State in the country on a formula basis. That benefits everyone. We put more money through the formula and less in the so-called new starts program which is fixed guideway and light rail programs, and so forth, which only benefit a handful of communities. We have tried to put the transit funding more than ever before into a formula that benefits everyone, not just select areas of the country. I want to make one more comment about the new starts program. We do not know how much money is going to be available over the next 5 years to fund these expensive rail systems that a lot of communities want and often do not do the necessary cost-benefit analysis. The Department of Transportation Inspector General told us this year there are far more systems being proposed than we will ever have money to pay for. The requests exceed the resources by billions of dollars, so this bill takes a prudent step to slow down that program, put money instead into the formula grants instead of making some decisions that we might regret tomorrow on how we prioritize the new starts program. But the bill does fund all of the existing full funding grant agreements on new start programs that are between different communities and the Federal Transit Administration. In the Treasury Department of this bill, which includes the Internal Revenue Service, we essentially have funded it at the same level of fiscal year 2004. Some of the proposals we believe need further refinement. New initiatives such as the IRS initiative to increase its hiring to improve collections are too financially ambitious for the budget climate we have. One of the largest increases in the bill, 12.7 percent, goes to what is known as FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It is part of the Department of Treasury and it is part of counterterrorism activities, trying to disrupt the financial basis of terrorists. When we look at another part of the bill, the Executive Office, the President, the White House and the offices that work with the White House, it is actually a little below last year's because we have reduced contract programs. The bill includes funding for the majority of the construction program of the GSA, General Services Administration. That is the landlord for the Federal Government. But even though it includes the majority of the GSA construction program and GSA says it has something like a $7 billion backlog, we have shaved back those requests to meet our budget allocation. All 12 border stations that are proposed in the budget request are fully funded because of the priority that we have given to homeland security. A more complete summary of all of the funding levels in the bill, as well as significant provision, is in the committee report at pages 3 and 4, and I direct Members to those pages. Mr. Chairman, a final comment before I close my debate for now. My final comment is about the messiness that I know we are going to experience with the points of order and money in the bill being stricken. We are probably going to have to offer some amendments on what do we do with the money. I would just as soon have it go to pay the national debt, but in our protocol that is not how it works in this process. So if some money is stricken on points of order, I will offer the necessary amendments to park that money into some of the major accounts with the understanding that when we get to conference we will be overcoming the parliamentary problems of those points of order and restoring that money to the transportation programs which I think some people are going to try to take it from with their points of order. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver), our ranking member. The gentleman presents his personal views and the views of the minority tenaciously and effectively and is good to work with. I appreciate that and his no-nonsense approach to things. I also appreciate our staff that has worked so well and will reiterate a thank you to them later on before we close this debate. This is a good, solid bill. It is responsible. It merits and deserves the support of every Member of this body, and I ask that Members support it when we come to passage of the bill. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I appreciate the help of the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver) in trying to expedite the time for the benefit of everyone. Let me just make a couple of responses to things that a couple of speakers mentioned on the Help America Vote Act. We have provided federally something like a little bit over $3 billion in the last couple of years to improve voting systems around the country. A billion dollars of that remains unspent. The States are not prepared for us to add more money on this bill or any other bill because they have got $1 billion that has not been spent yet. They are waiting on some voting standards that are supposed to be coming from the Federal Commission, which has not produced those standards yet. So I do not think it would be responsible for us to take away from other urgent and pressing priorities to put more money into an account that already has much more money than it is able to spend. So I figured it was important to mention that. Let me, in closing, Mr. Chairman, repeat something I said before, and I realize it is confusing to anyone that may be listening as well as to Members. We will be having in this bill a number of parliamentary tactics, points of order brought up. It is not because we on the Committee on Appropriations have not produced a responsible piece of legislation, trying to fund the most important priorities in transportation and in the Federal agencies that are a part of this bill. However, because the authorizing committee has not been able to complete its work, it is overdue by over a year now, we have some things that technically are unauthorized programs. It is unauthorized for this Congress to provide Federal highway transportation dollars. Now, it is authorized to collect the gasoline tax that our citizens and our constituents pay at the pump. They are paying the fuel tax, but it is not authorized with that money to go back into the roads. That is not right, so we went ahead and we provided that transportation funding. We provided the highway funding and the transit funding and the aviation funding, even though the authorizers say, Well, it is not authorized. So because of that, they are going to come to this floor, and people are going to say: Well, strike out this part of the bill. Strike out funding for highways. Strike out provisions, some of which spend money and some of which, frankly, save money. We are going to have a messy process. But ultimately, when this committee produces the House-Senate conference report, we are going to take care of those things that are addressed in this. We will resolve the parliamentary problems because, frankly, the points of order, the parliamentary points of order do not lie against a conference report as they do against legislation in the House.

Mr. ISTOOK. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is certainly correct. Reclaiming my time, this Committee on Appropriations is doing its work, whether the rest of Congress is able to for whatever reason fulfill their work or not. I regret that this is going to be a messy process. We are going to have some things stricken out of the bill. If the things that the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure want stricken out of the bill are all out, we would be above our budget allocation. We would be in violation of the rules of this House on the amount of money that we have to spend. That is pretty bad when we have a deficit already to make it worse. We are not going to do that. We will make sure appropriate amendments are offered and that this bill ultimately is within the amount of money that has been allocated to our subcommittee. There may be some money that has been shifted about to what essentially will be a holding account, just to make sure that we reserve it, and we will resolve those things in committee. I realize it is confusing, Mr. Chairman, but I appreciate the trust and patience of the Members of this body in resolving it. I do, in final comment, want to make sure that I express my appreciation for the people that work behind the scenes so hard and so diligently to help us present this legislation: The chief clerk of our subcommittee, Rich Efford; the staff members of the subcommittee, Cheryle Tucker, Leigha Shaw, Dena Baron, Kristen Jones; and a member of my staff who works on these issues, Kurt Conrad, as well as my chief of staff, John Albaugh. We are grateful because we, as Members of Congress, could not do our work without the good support of these people. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts and other Members for their comments. I ask every Member to support this bill. Mr. Chairman, I was ready to yield back the balance of my time, but I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica).

Mr. ISTOOK. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica).