F. Sensenbrenner

Mr. SENSENBRENNER

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I understand that the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Cramer) wants to engage in a colloquy, and this seems to be about the last chance to do that before general debate is over with. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers). (Mr. EHLERS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert), the subcommittee chairman.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, H.R. 1553, the National Weather Service and Related Agencies Authorization Act of 1999 authorizes a total of $1.391 billion for fiscal year 2000 and $1.468 billion for fiscal year 2001 for the National Weather Service, the NOAA office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Programs, the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service and related facilities. The NWS, supported by the Atmospheric Research and NESDIS programs, provides around-the-clock weather and flood warning and forecast services to the general public for the protection of life and property. The NWS data is used by private sector, commercial and weather service firms which provide specialized forecasts for a variety of business uses. The additional funds authorized by this bill will, first, provide an increase of nearly 10 percent in the lead time for tornado warnings, particularly to those areas of the Nation such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, the Midwest and the Southeast that are subject to devastating tornadoes; second, also provide an increase of 10 percent in forecast accuracy of the onset of freezing temperatures, particularly important for agricultural regions; third, provide an increase of nearly 5 percent in the forecast accuracy of heavy snowfall and severe storm warnings; and last, maintain current capabilities and hurricane forecasts and flood warnings. I commend the bill to the House for its adoption. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Speaker, I have discussed with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Costello), and unless there is an amendment that we do not know about, we will probably not have votes on the next bill that is coming up. I cannot give a complete assurance that there will be no rollcall votes, but my guess is that all of the amendments and the bill will be disposed of by voice vote and the Members can take that into account when making their plans.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and to place extraneous material in the Record on H.R. 1654, the bill just passed.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word and I rise in opposition to the amendment. Mr. Chairman, let me associate myself with the remarks of the gentleman from California, with one exception. I doubt that those sailors on Columbus' boats would have advocated defunding that mission because that meant they would not have been paid when they got back to Spain. But other than that, I think the argument of the gentleman had a lot of merit, and I would hope that the committee and the House would not be fooled by the opponent's scare tactics. The ground-based flight hardware is 82 percent complete. If we adopt this amendment of the gentleman from Indiana, that hardware will not go to orbit but will end up in museums around the country as an exhibit of Congress' foolishness in defunding the program when it was close to completion. The flight hardware for the next six flights is already at the Kennedy Space Center being ready for launch. We American taxpayers have invested $20 billion so far in this project. If the amendment of the gentleman from Indiana were adopted, that money would go right down the drain. And that is a pretty tough sell to tell our taxpayers that we made a $20 billion mistake. I would hope that this amendment would be rejected and rejected by the same overwhelming margins that have occurred in the last several votes on this topic.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to accept the amendment of the gentleman from New York. It requires a certification in advance that the cooperative agreement with the People's Republic of China does not harm the U.S. space launch industry or improve the missile launch capabilities of China and also directs the NASA Inspector General to conduct an annual audit to make sure that these certifications are being complied with. It is a constructive amendment, and I hope it is adopted.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I am afraid the gentleman is kind of confusing apples with oranges because the earlier figure was the construction cost. The later figure that the gentleman from Oklahoma is using is the construction cost plus the operations cost over the full 15 to 20-year life cycle of the station. I will be the first to concede that as a result of the Russian failures to do what they agreed to the construction costs to the U.S. taxpayers have gone up, but the 1994 figures that the gentleman from Oklahoma gave did not include any operations cost whatsoever. So there has not been a fourfold increase.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment. Mr. Chairman, this is one of the rites of spring that occurs in our Nation's capital city every year. The cherry blossoms come up, there are a lot of tourists, particularly schoolchildren, that come to see our Nation's capital, and the gentleman from Indiana starts to kill the Space Station again. First, there is a cap for the next 3 years contained in the bill that is before us. That cap is contained in the authorization amounts of $2,482,700,000 for fiscal year 2000, $2.328 billion for fiscal year 2001 and $2.91 billion for fiscal year 2002. That cap is there. That fully funds the administration's request on this subject. We are being very bipartisan on that. Secondly, the amendment that the gentleman is proposing now will be directly in conflict with the next amendment that the gentleman intends to propose which gets the Russian government out of the critical path, because the budgets that NASA has put together assume that the Russians will be able to fulfill their obligations under the Space Station agreement. The gentleman from Indiana and I happen to agree that the Russians have not done that. But if he removes the Russians from the program, it is going to cost more money. So the cap that he puts on will prevent NASA from spending more money which will be caused by the next amendment that the gentleman from Indiana intends to propose. Really, I think the gentleman ought to go to his third amendment which kills the Space Station altogether, because that implements what he wants to do. What he wants to do there is wrong and has been rejected overwhelmingly by the House of Representatives in the past, and I would hope would be rejected again in the future. The conflicting messages that are being sent by the different caps that are being discussed here is not going to do NASA any good, is not going to do the program any good, and it is just going to confuse everyone in terms of responsible budgeting. I hope that that is not what the gentleman from Indiana has in mind. Because in determining how much the Space Station costs, an essential element is going to be the economic and political direction that Russia takes and how the United States of America, which includes the President, the Congress and the American people, respond to it. I just would hope that NASA's hands would not be tied through the adoption of the amendment that the gentleman from Indiana is proposing at the present time, that NASA be able to have the flexibility in dealing with Russian contingencies head-on. For that reason, I would urge the committee to reject the amendment that he has proposed.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, the amendment of the gentleman from Arizona is a very constructive one and I am happy to accept it.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. I do not know.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. That is the current estimate, but to say that the cost has gone up by four times, as my colleagues know, uses a figure in the beginning that did not include any operational cost and the figure in the end that does. So it is not a comparable comparison between the current cost estimate and the cost estimate that was utilized in 1994.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in reluctant opposition to this amendment. Mr. Chairman, the heart of gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner) is in the right place on this amendment, but this is not a fiscally responsible way of going about addressing this problem, since the amendment is an add-on of approximately $10 million additional authorization for each of the next 3 years. NASA is committed to spending $25 million for aircraft noise reduction in fiscal year 2000. So it is not a question of whether we spend nothing on aircraft noise reduction research or some money, because NASA has got that money allocated within one of their accounts. The bulk of NASA's aeronautic research into aircraft noise reduction technology was conducted within the research and technology base of the advanced subsonic technology program. The administration, and I emphasize the administration, decided to terminate the advanced subsonic technology program when a determination was made that NASA needed additional funding for the International Space Station. That was budget discipline. That was setting priorities. That was something that the administration decided that it had to do in terms of meeting its obligations. For us to turn and go around and say we should forget about budget priorities, we should simply add to the authorization, I think diminishes the credibility of the efforts of the Committee on Science to figure out how we will be able to give NASA the money that is available for this year to the highest and best effect. NASA has already testified before Congress that they are meeting their goals on aircraft noise reduction technology research within the money that is available. Because of this, we should accept the fact that they know how much they can spend on it. We should not be dealing with this problem simply by throwing more money at it. I would love to be able to meet everyone's desires, but that is not the way life is in the real world and in the budget climate we are facing. We have to be responsible. This amendment is not fiscally responsible. It runs counter to NASA's expert opinion on their requirements. It breaks our obligations to the taxpayers, and I would ask the committee to reject it.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman's amendment is a very good one. Again, it is supported by NASA. I would hope that the committee would approve it.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. It would give the NASA administrator the authority to use some of the aerospace technology funds, which is almost a billion dollars, for the ultra-efficient engine at the discretion of the NASA administrator?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, let me ask a couple of questions, if I could, and I thank the gentleman for yielding. The amendment that the gentleman has offered, if it is adopted, would not increase the total amount of money that was authorized for NASA; am I correct in that?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment offered by the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). Mr. Chairman, there has been a lot of confusion relative to what the bill does in this area, and I would like to dwell on two points. First of all, the manager's amendment that the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) has introduced makes it clear that NASA will be able to continue research in the ultra efficient engine. There is $50 million a year that is authorized for that. I think that that is a very wise move, because I do not think we should back away from this program altogether. The second misconception that I am afraid is floating around here is that if NASA designates a program as a focus program, then that program is protected against raids by NASA or OMB or the Congress or anybody else to take the money away from a focus program and put it into something else. That is not the case. OMB in the past has canceled focus programs and stuck the money into other NASA programs, and there have been reprogramming requests that have come up from the administrator and which have been approved either by the Congress by not acting or have been in transfer authority in appropriation bills. The one that immediately comes to mind is the high speed research and advanced subsonic focus program which was in the aeronautics budget that NASA canceled and put the money in the International Space Station when the International Space Station ran short. So I think that what is being done here is to continue the research but not to make it a focus program, and thus not to have what effectively is an earmark but an earmark without teeth. Now having said all of that, one of the things that the science policy study attempts to do, which received overwhelming support on both sides of the aisle when it was approved last year, is to leverage government dollars with private sector dollars and dollars from other sources so that we have a bigger research pot, and that is what the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) is trying to do in this program. We do not have enough government money to do everything that we want to do, and the NASA administrator has criticized this bill for being above the President's request. What we would like to do is we would like to bring the private sector in, and it is the private sector that is going to be able to reap the financial rewards of a successful development of an ultra-efficient engine. To have the taxpayers pay for the entire cost of developing the ultra-efficient engine is going to give the private sector a free ride, let us face it. So this is a way to bring about cost sharing, to bring about the fact that the private sector has to put their money where their benefits will flow, and I think is a very, very constructive step in the right direction to start this program out.

Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?