John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, President Bush claims that his administration has ``brought sorely needed fiscal discipline to Washington.'' The same day, his budget director warns us not to expect another surplus until 2005, after the president's first term is over. If this is fiscal discipline, it has an odd bottom line. President Bush took office with an advantage no president in recent times has enjoyed: a budget in surplus. Ten days after his inaugural, the Congressional Budget Office projected a surplus of $313 billion in fiscal 2002, and over ten years, a cumulative surplus of $5.6 trillion. More than half of that has vanished. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitchell Daniels, blames the economy, extra spending, the fight against terrorism--everything but tax cuts. Last month, economists on the House and Senate Budget Committees updated their estimates of the economy and budget. Their analysis is as close as you can get to a consensus on where we stand now. They show that over ten years the tax cut takes a toll of $1.7 trillion on the budget and accounts for 55 percent of the depletion in the surplus. Spending related to the war on terrorism, initiated after September 11, takes another 11 percent. Other spending increases take 11 percent, and of that, the President's request for defense constitutes two-thirds. The remaining 23 percent is due to the economy. The economy is a major factor over the next two years. But as the economy recover, its drain on the budget tapers off. The President's tax cuts get bigger. Budget Committee estimates show a remaining surplus over ten years of $2.6 trillion, but virtually all comes from the Social Security Trust Fund, which everyone has sworn not to touch; and most of that is concentrated in future years where the outlook is very uncertain. When the President submits next year's budget in February, an updated forecast of the economy will come with it, and the $2.6 trillion surplus will surely shrink again. Mr. Daniels no doubt had that forecast in hand when he warned of the vanishing surplus. The Budget Committee estimates were put together as part of a bipartisan search for common ground. Leaders on Budget, Finance, and Ways and Means met to settle on policies to stimulate the economy. We settled instead for a statement of principles. We agreed that stimulus was needed but that it should be short-lived, to avoid converting a cyclical downswing into a structural deficit. We wanted the budget to recover as the economy recovers. The stimulus bill reported by Ways and Means forsook these principles and proposed more permanent tax cuts, with revenue losses continuing long after the recession ends. More than half of the surplus is gone, and the plan to save the Social Security surpluses and buy back government bonds is in grave doubt. But the administration seems to find no lesson in these results. On the same day Mr. Daniels made his gloomy prediction, the White House renewed discussions on a stimulus plan, and afterwards told the media that repeal of the corporate alternative minimum tax had to be part of any stimulus plan the President signed. In the short run, this will not help the economy; in the long run, it will not help the budget. In all events, it begs the question: How will we pay for the war on terrorism, for homeland defense, for reinsurance of terrorist damages, for victims' compensation, and for that matter, for the baby boomers' retirement? No one is blaming the administration for the recession, but it can be faulted for ignoring the clouds and betting the budget on a blue-sky forecast. We warned that its budget had no margin for error if the projections it was based upon failed to pan out. We warned that the tax cuts left little room for other priorities, like Medicare drug coverage or the solvency of Social Security. The administration acted as if we could have it all. Now that it's clear we can't, it seems as unwilling as ever to recast its budget. This is not fiscal discipline; this fiscal denial. If the administration wants to put the economy and the budget back on path, it has to heed the lessons of the last ten months and acknowledge that the underpinnings of its budget no longer hold.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, a year ago, economists surveyed the future and saw nothing but surpluses: $5.6 trillion over the next ten years. Today, the ten-year surplus is at $2.6 trillion and falling, and virtually all that's left comes from Social Security. When the President submits next year's budget, an updated economic forecast will come with it, and the surplus will officially shrink again. the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitchell Daniels, blames the economy, extra spending, the fight against terrorism--everything but tax cuts. All of these have an impact, but over ten years, the Bush tax cuts take a toll of $1.7 trillion on the budget, and account for 55% of the depletion in the surplus--and this is just the toll of tax cuts already passed. Marking time is a little- noticed agenda of highly probable, politically compelling tax cuts that could wipe out much of the remaining surplus. At the top of this agenda, awaiting a fix, is the alternative minimum tax (AMT). Last year only 1.5 million individual taxpayers had to deal with the AMT, but due to inflation, rising incomes, and an unindexed exemption, the AMT will become a household acronym to millions of middle-income Americans. Before enactment of the Bush tax cuts, the number of individual taxpayers affected by the AMT was expected to mushroom to 17.5 million by 2010. The Bush tax act created new tax benefits without corresponding adjustments to the AMT, at least not after 2004. As a result, the number of taxpayers affected by the AMT will double by 2010, grow to 35.5 million--or to one in every three individual taxpayers. When these folks find that tax benefits are extended in one part of the code only to be retracted in another, they will protest bitterly, and in time Congress is certain to fix the AMT so that it does not come down on middle-income taxpayers. The cost of confining the AMT to its ambit before the Bush tax cuts would be about $268 billion over 2003-12. But this would leave more than 17 million taxpayers facing the AMT. If taxable income exempt from the AMT were indexed at last year's level, those affected in 2010 could be limited to about 8 million, but at a heavy cost, a further revenue loss of $241 billion. Just as probable as some fix to the AMT is the renewal of tax benefits set to expire. The tax code is full of short-lived benefits. CBO and OMB do not try to divine what Congress will do when these deductions and credits reach the end of their legislated lives. They simply assume that expiring provisions will not be renewed. But these are popular tax benefits, and they are almost always renewed. The revenues forgone by renewing the most prominent tax benefits from 2003 through 2012 would be about $174 billion. This, however, omits the largest expiring provision. In an effort to shoehorn as many tax cuts as possible into a package limited to $1.35 trillion, congressional Republicans put a ``sunset'' in their tax bill, terminating all of the cuts by the end of 2010. They obviously do not intend for the sun to set on their tax cuts. They stuck in a ``repealer'' to diminish the apparent size of the tax bill, knowing that Congress will be hard-pressed to repeal tax cuts already in place. In time, the ``repealer'' itself will probably be repealed. If so, the revenue loss will be $373 billion over 2003-2012. When each of these actions is taken into account, an additional $1 trillion in revenue losses has to be deducted from the budget between 2003 and 2012, along with an additional $143 billion in debt service. The impact on the budget, all told, comes to $1.2 trillion. This dashes any hope that the nation can repay its publicly held debt before the baby boomers retire. It also puts the ``stimulus package'' in context. Disdaining the vanishing surplus and the agenda of tax cuts to come, Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee brought forth a stimulus package full of tax cuts with doubtful effects on the economy, but with a clear impact on the surplus, reducing it by $250 billion over the next ten years. If this bill became law, it would push the overall price of the pending tax-cut agenda to almost $3.5 trillion and wipe out what remains of the surplus. The projection of ten-year surpluses soaring toward $6 trillion left in its wake a sense of euphoria, a feeling that we could have it all. It's clear now that we can't, but in the meantime, out-sized tax cuts have overridden other priorities, like prescription drug coverage under Medicare. If we want to put the economy and the budget back on path, there is an axiom worth recalling from the days of intractable deficits: When you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to quit digging. That's why we should resist a bill with tax cuts that would drain the surplus without stimulating the economy.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I was late arriving this morning, and I missed rollcall vote 510, final passage of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2002. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Frost) for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, the country is in revision, businesses are failing, people are hurting, losing their jobs by the thousands, and what do we have as a solution? Here in the middle of the night, hours before we adjourn, we are presented with a bill that half of us have never seen, and what we have seen of it we do not like. This is called an economic stimulus bill, but it could easily be called round two of tax reduction because it is full of tax cuts that will have a doubtful impact on the economy as a whole, but will have a clear impact on the budget. It will bring the surplus down by $272 billion. That is the latest estimate just given to us by the Joint Committee on Taxation. It did not have to be this way, Mr. Speaker. Two months ago, the principals on the Committee on the Budget, the Committee on Financial Services, the Committee on Ways and Means met to settle on policies to stimulate this economy. We settled instead for a statement of principles. We agreed that stimulus was needed but we thought that it should be temporary, short-lived to last through the recession but no longer. Why? We wanted to keep a cyclical downswing from becoming a structural deficit. We wanted the budget to recover as the economy recovered. The stimulus bill that was first reported by the Committee on Ways and Means forsook all of these principles. It proposed more permanent tax cuts, lasting a long time after the recession ends. Here are the stimulus principles that we proposed. Bipartisan, bicameral principles. We said, look, if there is any lesson to be learned from the last 10 years, it is that long-term fiscal discipline is essential to sustain economic growth. We saw it for 8 straight years. The bottom line of the budget got better, and we had 120 consecutive months of economic growth. We said we wanted to continue that policy. Secondly, we said, have a stimulus policy, surely, but make them last no longer than 1 year. Thirdly, we said make them broad based, not industry specific. Reading this bill we see plenty of industry specific stuff in it. Fourthly, we said 1 percent of GDP should do the job, about $100 billion, and take into consideration, we said, that we have spent $40 billion since August. Finally, we said to uphold the policy of repaying the greatest amount of national debt feasible between 2002 and 2011, out-year offsets should make up over time for the cost of near-term economic stimulus. Obviously, we do not want to offset the cost of this bill in this bill today, but we can build into this bill a provision that will regenerate the revenues we will lose from it in the future, and we can absolve the bottom line. Now, why does all this matter? Why does all this matter? Because a lot of us who have been here for a long time have this sinking feeling we are about to slip back into the old practice of borrow and spend. Why does it matter? Because of the lesson we have learned for the past 10 years. This year we started with the best fiscal condition the country has ever enjoyed, a surplus projected to be $5.6 trillion just last January. Today, that surplus stands at $2.6 trillion and is falling fast. The economy is taking its toll, but 55 percent of the decline in the surplus was due to the tax cuts we passed last June. Now, this $2.6 trillion, $2.3 trillion range in which the surplus now lies is all together Social Security and Medicare surplus. There is no general fund surplus at all. And this is before farm bill, before defense supplemental, before homeland security, and before assessing the $272 billion cost of this bill. Why are we worried about this bill? Because it is going to wipe out the surplus. It will dash our hopes which we held together of taking the Social Security surplus, saving the surplus, and buying off the national debt so that we prepare ourselves for the retirement of the baby boomers. This bill, Mr. Speaker, has doubtful effects on the economy, but it has a clear impact on the budget, and it is a deleterious impact. It is something we do not need to do. There is another way of doing it. There is a principled way of doing it. We should take that path and not take the path this bill proposes.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure of presenting our newest Member to the House of Representatives: Addison Graves Wilson, better known to us in South Carolina as just ``Joe.'' Joe Wilson will fill the seat held for 30 years by Floyd Spence and represent the Second District of South Carolina. In many ways he will also fill Floyd's shoes, because the people of that district have chosen a man closely akin to Floyd Spence in personality, in politics, and in dedication to public service. In fact, Floyd Spence was in many ways Joe Wilson's mentor. His first political experience, after college at Washington and Lee, was in working on Floyd's first campaign for Congress. He has worked on all of Floyd's campaigns since and served as manager or chairman of six. Joe Wilson was first elected to office in his own right in 1984 when he won a seat in the South Carolina Senate to serve Lexington County. His legislative experience is extensive. This past year he served as chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. He has also served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Education Committee, the Joint Committee on Aging, and the State House Committee. Before being elected to the South Carolina Senate, Joe Wilson served in the Army Reserves. He is now a colonel in the Army National Guard, staff judge advocate for the 218th Mechanized Infantry Brigade. He is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College, and two sons have followed his footsteps into the military. One is a first lieutenant in the Army National Guard, another is an ensign in the Navy, attending the Armed Forces medical school in Bethesda right now. Joe Wilson was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1947, to Hugh de Veaux Wilson and Wray Graves Wilson, both now deceased and unable to see their son attain, unfortunately, this high office. He is a lawyer, founder and senior partner in the law firm of Wilson, Moore, Taylor & Thomas in West Columbia. Joe Wilson is happily married to Roxanne Dusenbury McCrory; and he and Roxanne are the proud parents of four children, Michael Alan McCrory-Wilson; Addison Graves, Jr.; Julian Dusenbury; and Hunter Taylor. In addition to his legislative and military service, he has served as the deputy general counsel of the Department of Energy, and he has spent countless hours serving his community through a number of civic organizations. Mr. Speaker, as dean of the South Carolina delegation, it is my privilege and my honor to welcome Joe Wilson of South Carolina to the United States House of Representatives. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Brown) who served in the General Assembly with Joe Wilson and would like to say a word of introduction himself.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, Stan Kaplan survived the Depression, fought in World War II, and in 1965 moved with his wife, Sis, to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they purchased a radio station and took it to the top of the rating charts. Stan Kaplan died this week, leaving his adopted community far better than he found it. The Charlotte Observer sketched his life in an article that I would like to share with other Members of Congress. One can say of Stan Kaplan's life as another transplanted Charlottean, Harry Golden, said of his own life: Only in America. I submit ``Kaplan, Unsung, if Seldom Unheard, Hero'' for inclusion in the Record. Kaplan: Unsung, if Seldom Unheard, Hero (By Jim Morrill and Mark Washburn) He was a brash Yankee who brought his liberal politics and oversize personality to a Southern city that still minded its manners. Over the next four decades, Stan Kaplan never changed. But Charlotte did, often with a nudge from him. That awkward beginning turned into a comfortable, mutually beneficial partnership. Kaplan, who suffered from cancer died late Monday of a heart attack. He was 76. A funeral will be at noon today at Temple Beth El, 5101 Providence Road. Along with his wife, Sis, Kaplan helped transform Charlotte radio and founded the weekly Leader newspaper. He became a civic fixture who gave generously to the arts and other causes, as well as Democratic candidates. ``He was one of the great unsung heroes of Charlotte in the last 50 years,'' said developer Johnny Harris. ``Stan and Sis have been such a major part of making this city better for all the people.'' In a city of gray suits, Kaplan was a Technicolor character. With beefy girth and bushy eyebrows, he managed a rumpled look despite tailored suits and French cuffs. He loved golf, good cigars and fancy cars. He once drove a Rolls Royce with a hood ornament that featured his own likeness, cigar and all. A Pennsylvania native, he was a consummate salesman. During the Depression be sold Band-Aids on the street and one year made more money than his father, a furniture salesman. After going off to fight in Normandy, he returned home and bounced around a succession of colleges and jobs in radio management. He was working in syndication when he met Sis Atlass. More smitten with her than she was with him, he turned to a sales technique: flip charts. ``Stanley's fantastic,'' said one. ``You'll just love being married to him,'' said another. ``He's better looking than you think,'' read a third. It worked. He and Sis, the daughter of a Chicago broadcasting executive, decided to buy their own radio station. Scouring the country, they settled in 1965 on a small Charlotte station called WAYS-AM, then in last place among eight AM stations. The Kaplans renamed it ``Big WAYS,'' changed the music to Top 40--then an alien format in the Carolinas--and spent lavishly on talent. Kaplan had a gift for gimmicks, and his first one shot the station past market leader WBT, then a courtly CBS affiliate still airing ``The Arthur Godfrey Show'' and soap operas. He buried $10,000 and launched the ``Big-WAYS'' treasure hunt, giving clues over the air. The hunt transformed Charlotte into a moonscape of craters. Excavations were found in vacant lots, parks and private yards. Police complained. So did the Federal Communications Commission. But Kaplan was undeterred, telling a critic at The Charlotte News, ``You can say what you want, just get my call letters right.'' The critic was John Kilgo, who later worked for Kaplan as news director of WAYS and is now associate publisher of The Leader. ``He was an extremely competitive man,'' Kilgo said. ``He would win the ratings battle and send a ratings book over to WBT to make sure they saw it.'' Jim Babb, then general sales manager at WBT, said, ``Stanley turned the radio market upside down for the paltry sum of $10,000.'' Riding rock music's surge of popularity, ``Sixty-wonderful WAYS'' was soon king of Charlotte radio and the talk of the industry. Kaplan bought another station--WROQ-FM--in 1972. He had an eye for talent and hired a hit parade of personalities including Morton Downey Jr., Jay Thomas, Robert Murphy, Long John Silver and Jack Gale. ``Stan hired people a little left of center, brilliant broadcasters but quirky in their own way. But Stan loved that. They were personalities,'' said NBC6 forecaster Larry Sprinkle, who spent 13 years at the station. Since 1950, when he campaigned in Boston for a young Jack Kennedy's congressional campaign, Kaplan remained a fan of the family, campaigning later for Bobby and Ted Kennedy. On the Kaplans' 10th anniversary, they were feted at a party by Bobby Kennedy's widow, Ethel. ``I don't know anybody who knew Stanley who didn't love him,'' said former Kennedy aide Frank Mackiewicz. He donated generously to N.C. Democrats, including Harvey Gantt, Jim Hunt and John Edwards. ``While he loved politics, you wouldn't say he was politic himself,'' said retired banker Hugh McColl Jr., a longtime friend. ``Stanley was an in-your-face kind of guy.'' The outspoken Kaplan once shoved a WBT reporter, which brought him an assault charge and eventual acquittal. Through it all, he remained a salesman. Selling his radio stations, buying a newspaper, selling it and buying it again. ``He couldn't stay out of the action,'' said McColl. ``I was always advising him to enjoy the roses, but that wasn't him. He was always back in the fray. Loved it too much. Loved the competition.'' In addition to his wife, Kaplan is survived by daughters Leslie Kaplan Schlernitzauer and Susan Kaplan Guild. The family requests memorials be made to Temple Beth El, or to Charlotte Children's Hospital Fund in honor of Grace Schlernitzauer through the Foundation for the Carolinas, 217 S. Tryon St. In an unusual tribute, at least 14 Charlotte radio stations will observe a moment of silence this afternoon in Kaplan's memory. Jay Thomas, the former Kaplan DJ who went on to become a TV star, last spoke to Kaplan a week ago, as Kaplan lay ill with cancer. To his surprise, Kaplan started talking about his latest marketing project for The Leader. ``I said, `Stan, I can't believe you're still trying to make sales calls,` ' Thomas recalls. ``He said, `Just think. There's going to be someone out there who's going to say I was Stan Kaplan's last pitch.' '' ---

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I come from textile country, and I have seen the effects of imports upon jobs in the area where I live, $77 billion trade deficit in textiles and apparel last year. Over the last 10 years, we have lost about a million jobs in textile and apparel, and I can tell my colleagues, from my own district, my own State, from the Carolinas to the southeast, only a minute percentage of these people who have lost their jobs have been able to get trade adjustment assistance benefits. That is a hard truth. We have heard these benefits extolled here on the floor, but in truth, very, very few people qualify for them. It is shameful how little we do for the people we know are going to be hurt by the trade policies that we adopt, and anybody who thinks that this is going to make it easier to vote for fast track, easier to vote for trade promotion authority, they better think again, because this bill is a pittance. This bill will do very little. It does nothing to expand the eligibility of these people we know are going to be direct hits. They are not collateral casualties in this war. They are direct hits. We know when we lower the tariffs, get rid of the quotas, that textiles are going to come flooding into our markets by an even greater volume and quantity, and we know exactly who is going to be hurt and who is going to be hit. No question about it, they are direct hits. We say that we have got these benefits for them so they can have this marvelous change of life, this mid-course adjustment, but in truth, they have still got a house payment to make. They have still got car payments to make, and I know from talking to countless textile workers in my own district, very, very few of them, if they have it, can afford to exercise their COBRA benefits out of the meager unemployment income that they receive. This is a mirage. Worse still, it is deceitful. It holds out that we are doing something significant when there is an agenda full of changes recommended to TAA that should start with the Department of Labor, which is woefully, woefully understaffed to handle the volume of applications under TAA. This is a pittance compared to what needs to be done, and we should be ashamed that we are bringing this up in the name of helping people who are going to be hurt by trade.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, as a veteran of every textile battle that has been fought on this floor for the last 20 years, let me warn my colleagues, you are badly mistaken if you think this bill is going to help our beaten and beleaguered industry. First of all, it purports to put up $9.5 million for additional Customs enforcement. I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I am glad to have $9.5 million, but I am also sensible enough to know that it does not amount to a thing until there is an appropriation. And what bill would provide the appropriation? Treasury-Postal. Long gone. When is there another vehicle coming? Who knows. Secondly, this bill purports to deal with transshipment. Now, this is a chronic problem. I know it. I have offered legislation in the past to deal with it. If you wanted to get at it, you would get at the biggest offender, China, when the MFN bill came through here. In any event, this is not the real problem today, because transhipment is mainly about quota evasion, and quotas have grown so liberal and increased every year that we have a $77 billion trade deficit today in textiles and apparel. In any event, in any event, changing the definition of transshipment and asking for a General Accounting Office report on transshipment is not going to do a doggone thing about the problem until you put up money for additional Customs enforcement agents to do something about it. My friends, if you want to make sure textiles do not become the sacrificial lamb, the donor industry, in the next round of trade negotiations, if that is what you want to do, we ought to be out here on the floor mandating USTR, no further tariff cuts in textiles, no acceleration of the integration agreement and the abandonment of quotas. Textiles, believe me, Mr. Speaker, is an industry that is not just hurting, but is hemorrhaging and in desperate need of help, but this bill is deceitful in pretending to help and doing so very little.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. SPRATT. Could the Chair inform the House at what page we are in the bill?

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his assurance. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

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

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, this bill increases missile defense by $2.6 billion to $2.7 billion, 50 percent over last year's level, but it ends a system that everyone has long thought essential to missile defense, and that is a program called ``SBIRS-Low,'' for Space-Based Infrared Sensors. Ever since the beginning of SDI, space-based sensors have been a key element of the architecture. Their role is to pick up the oncoming reentry vehicles, shortly after they are launched, well over radar's horizon, track them, plot the trajectory, project their aim points, and watch for features that distinguish the real RVs from decoys. Over the last 18 years, ballistic missile defense has evolved through various options to a system called SBIRS-Low to handle this mission. These are satellite sensors in low-Earth orbit, some 18 to 30 in all, depending on the configuration, and they are on constant patrol or will be, once launched, in circling the globe. Now comes this bill and, out of the blue, kills SBIRS-Low, a program some 6 or 7 years old. My amendment would bring it back, restore funding to the level that was approved by the House Committee on Armed Services and by the Senate Armed Services Committee, to $360 million, which is $25 million below the President's request. While this bill terminates SBIRS-Low, it recognizes the critical need for such a system. In fact it directs the Department of Defense to start over, to set up two new R&D programs, where $250 million would go to a space-based alternative, $75 million would go into ground-based alternatives, which would probably be X-band radars. My amendment, as I said, reverses this action and restores funding to SBIRS-Low. Let me explain why SBIRS-Low is critical to national missile defense but also to theater missile defense. First of all, SBIRS-Low allows a mid-course interceptor to make the most of its biggest advantage, which is time. The mid-course takes as much as 30 minutes during which an RV moves in its trajectory toward its target. Without satellite sensors over the horizon, radar gives missile defenses about half this amount of time to track, to launch, and to make the intercept. This is precious time. It could easily make the difference between success and failure. Second, infrared sensors not only detect heat, but changes in heat, something radars cannot do. Many countermeasures like decoys and balloons lose heat faster than do reentry vehicles, so SBIRS-Low becomes the first device we have to detect these changes and discriminate between real RVs as opposed to decoys and countermeasures. Third, ground-based systems will have X-band radar to help them track their incoming radar, but X-band radar is not a volume search radar; it emits a beam that provides high-resolution feedback, but it is a pencil-point beam. It is very narrow. SBIRS-Low spares the X-band radar from having to scan the skies and directs it precisely to its target. This makes X-band radar more efficient and effective and reduces the so-called ``engagement box'' to which the kill vehicle is launched, which increases the probability of an intercept. Finally, SBIRS-Low provides redundancy. It provides several different modes for detecting oncoming systems and it also provides backup in case the radar is not working. Now, I would hasten to say all of these features have yet to be proven, but the system is well along, the potential has been demonstrated. If it is not in hand, it appears to be within reach, and this is why SBIRS-Low is crucial, critical, for ground-based defenses, but it pays for itself in other ways, too: Theater missile defense. It expands the reach of THAAD in the Navy's upper tier. Second, at the same time that SBIRS-Low is on station, it can pick up some very useful technical intelligence data. Third, it can do miscellaneous other things. It can look for objects in space that might be on a collision course with our satellites and report that back to us. The committee bases its decision to terminate this in large part on an unreleased study that is still in draft at the Institute for Defense Analysis. I met with the author of this study, along with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), and it seems to me, in all due respect, that the information in the draft report given to the Subcommittee on Defense was in large part beyond its means. The subcommittee appears to me to be extrapolating from a worst-case scenario to a judgment on the system in all scenarios. In particular, part of the IDA report examined one specific national missile attack, the most sophisticated of all scenarios, and assumed a minimum SBIRS-Low capability. It then compared SBIRS-Low in what amounts to a worst-case capability scenario to an alternative consisting of ground-based radars spread throughout the world. This assumed, of course, that the U.S. would have no difficulty in obtaining these ground-based radars. In any event, it ignored many other scenarios where SBIRS-Low is cost effective, very effective, and it ignored all the other missions that SBIRS-Low can perform. The committee is also concerned about cost growth.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, let me just quickly say the Air Force originally assumed 21 satellites; it has now gone to 30. Get ready, this is going to be what happens to all of these component missile defense systems as it gets closer and closer, and the real cost is going up.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman. I was going to say to the distinguished chairman of this subcommittee, for whom I have great respect, I know the gentleman made a principal decision here. I hope he will go back and consider it again before the conference is out, talk to the folks at IDA and talk to the folks at BPDO.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, today, with almost no notice, the House takes up H.R. 3009. The ostensible reason is to extend the Andean Trade Preference Act. But if that were all it was about, we would voice-vote that extension in the blink of an eye. This bill does not stop there. It goes on and, for the first time, grants duty-free, quota-free access for textile and apparel imports coming from the Andean countries. In addition to that, as if that were not enough, it gratuitously grants new trade concessions on top of those granted last year to 24 Caribbean countries and the 22 sub- Saharan African countries. It has been said loosely on the floor here today, these are not major concessions, that they will not have terrific effects upon the textile industry. Let me tell my colleagues, this industry is reeling. Because of massive imports, job losses in textiles and apparel exceed the job losses in every other sector of our economy. When I came here, there were 2.1 million Americans working in the textile-apparel industry. Today, there are barely a million. Thus far, in this year alone, 2001, 118,000 textile and apparel workers have lost their jobs. In the past 3 months alone, 46,000 U.S. textile and apparel workers have lost their jobs. What is the cause of these staggering job losses? It is easy. It is a flood tide of imports. In 6 years, between 1994 and 2000, the annual level of textile and apparel imports rose by $33 billion, 90 percent. The total amount of textile and apparel imports into this country last year was $77.5 billion, and it is inevitably going up this year. This is known as a protected industry. Well, that is some protection, $77.5 billion of imports, and only a fraction of that goes back in exports. The reason for that, among other things, is that a dozen times over the last 10 to 15 years we have liberalized trade in textiles and apparel. We did it for the Caribbean, we did it for Israel, we did it for Jordan, we did it for Cambodia, we did it for sub-Saharan Africa, and, most notably of all, when we passed the World Trade Agreement, the Uruguay Round of the GATT talks, we passed something called the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, which will phase out all quotas by the end of 2004 and cut tariffs on textile and apparel goods. And the phaseout is going on as we speak. So what we have right now is tough enough for this industry to adjust to. It is struggling to survive. Just this week, Burlington, the largest textile manufacturer in America when I was elected to Congress, and for most of the years I have served here, Burlington petitioned for bankruptcy. That is how tough it is. Now, there are lots of reasons to vote against this bill, but let me just say that it is not a trivial imposition on the industry. The problem is, the devil is buried in the details of the bill, the technical details of the bill. This will open the floodgates even further. Let me mention just a couple of snippets from the bill to help my colleagues understand how. Despite claims by supporters, this bill will let Andean apparel made of fabrics formed almost anywhere in the world enter our country free of duties, free of quotas. By 2006, this bill will allow 1 billion square meters of regional fabric and apparel goods to enter this country from these four countries, duty free. As for sub-Saharan Africa, 22 countries, the Caribbean countries, the CBI countries, 24 countries, this bill takes last year's bill, which was a liberal concession, and basically doubles the limits imposed by the law we enacted last year and allows billions of additional square meters of fabric to come in. Do not let anyone tell say that the impact will be trivial; it will be substantial. I look at this and look at the industry and ask myself, why should the United States expand textile and apparel imports at a time when the economy is reeling, this sector of the economy is reeling, and almost being wiped out by textile and apparel imports? Why has this bill, with such potential for harm to lots of people, millions of people, been brought to the floor with such little notice for us to offer alternatives to it? Why, when we have an obvious alternative? This motion that I am offering now, this motion to recommit, offers Congress a square choice: If Congress wants to extend the expiring Andean Trade Preference Act, we can do it simply, we can do it expeditiously, we can do it with a clean extension of the act. That is what this motion would do, what the Senate does in its stimulus bill, and what we should do in the House: a clean extension of the Andean Trade Pact for 5 years without inflicting a blow upon an industry that is struggling to survive. I urge a ``yes'' vote for the motion to recommit.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. SPRATT. I am in its present form, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, the Andean Free Trade Preference Act expires in December; and if all we were talking about was the extension of the bill, it would be a simple matter. Most of us would vote for it. But this Andean Free Trade Pact extension is also an expansion. It goes far beyond simply expanding the free trade pact that has been in existence for the last 10 years. First of all, for the first time it extends duty-free, quota-free access to textile and apparel imports from four countries, the Andean countries. Secondly, it takes this bill which needs to pass in December and piggybacks on to it wholly gratuitous concessions to sub-Saharan African countries, 22 of them, who last year got substantial concessions in the African Growth and Opportunity Act. And then it extends a third time substantial concessions to the Caribbean countries, 24 of them. So we have really got three trade-expansion bills wrapped up in one. If it were just the Andean Pact we were talking about, it would be simple; but the problem is it goes much further. Mr. Speaker, over the last 15 years, we have liberalized trade and textiles and apparel again and again and again. First there was free trade for Israel. Then there was free trade or substantial concessions for the Caribbean countries. Then there was NAFTA. Then there were more concessions for the Caribbean countries so they would be treated like Mexico. Then there was the phase-out and elimination of quotas as a result of agreement on textile and clothing which was part of the WTO agreement in 1994. What is the result? What is the result of all of these free-trade concessions? Today, last year, textile and apparel imports into this country were $77.5 billion, $77.5 billion, up by 90 percent since 1994. Up by $35 billion since 1994. What is the result for the American textile worker? When I came here in 1983, there were 2.1, 2.2 million Americans engaged in textiles and apparel. Today there is barely over a million. And in the last 9 months, 118,000 textile and apparel workers have lost their jobs in this country. In the last 3 months, 46,000 textile and apparel workers have lost their jobs. This bill, this triple package with the Andean countries and the Caribbean countries and the sub-Saharan African countries all benefiting, substantially gaining greater rights to duty- free, quota-free access to our markets, this bill cannot help but continue the hemorrhage in job losses that we have experienced for the last 10 years. This struggling industry will be dealt a death blow by this particular bill. I am not exaggerating. There is a simpler, easier conclusion. We can have a clean bill, a mere expansion of the Andean Trade Preference Act, extend it for 5 years, extend it for 10 years. It does not matter to me what you extend it for, but keep it clean. Keep it related to the purpose at hand. Simply extend the pact that we have got. I will give the House that opportunity when the time comes for a motion to recommit, if of course this motion is not defeated; and that is the most efficient solution, defeat the motion and send the bill back so that it conforms to simply the Andean Free Trade Pact. But if the rule passes, I will offer a motion to recommit which will give everybody in the House that option, the option simply of extending the Andean Trade Pact so it helps those countries that we purport to help; but it does not help them at the expense of the million textile workers who are still left.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, on October 4 the Committee on the Budget principals, with OMB concurring, laid down principles for economic stimulus. We now have before us the Economic Security and Recovery Act, and it breaches all of those principles. It does little to help the economy recover. It does even less to help those this recession will hurt. This bill consists mostly of corporate tax cuts that were originally intended as Round Two of the President's tax agenda, now relabeled as tax relief for an ailing economy. This bill bends over backwards to help corporate taxpayers; yet it barely stoops to help unemployed Americans. The total impact of this bill on the budget is $275 billion over 10 years when interest is added; and of this $275 billion total, all of $6 billion at most is made available to assist the victims of this recession, the unemployed. By contrast, there is $21 billion in tax relief for multinational holding companies. This bill not only ignores the bipartisan principles, it repeats all the mistakes of the first Republican budget. It leaves no margin of error in case this recession is deeper and longer than projected. It makes no room for anything else, other than tax reduction, as if there were no more defense increases coming, no homeland defense, no farm bill, no natural disasters to pay for. It repeals the corporate minimum tax, but assumes that the individual AMT will go on and on. When we laid down those principles 2 weeks ago, what we tried to do was provide for short-term stimulus and long-term discipline, and this bill is miles off that mark. We started this year with a surplus projected over 10 years of $5.6 trillion. By mid-August that surplus had been cut to $3.4 trillion. By bipartisan revision it now stands at $2.6 trillion. This bill will take it down to $2.3 trillion. That means in less than a year we have cut the surplus by more than 60 percent. This is another step down a slippery slope that will do little for the economy but wipe out what is left of the surplus.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, as the Congress continues to move forward following the horrific and tragic events of September 11, 2001, I would like to insert for the Record a recent and I think timely speech given by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Mr. Annan's speech is about the contributions and vision of former U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. While the speech was given on September 6th, five days before the attacks, I believe it provides for interesting reading as we examine our notions of international security and multi-lateral cooperation. Dag Hammarskjold and the 21st Century (By Kofi Annan) As Secretary-General of the United Nations, I have to give many speeches, and even quite a few lectures. But I can think of no invitation to speak that is a greater honour, or a greater challenge, than this one. It will not surprise you to hear that Dag Hammarskjold is a figure of great importance for me--as he must be for any Secretary-General. His life and his death, his words and his action, have done more to shape public expectations of the office, and indeed of the Organisation, than those of any other man or woman in its history. His wisdom and his modesty, his unimpeachable integrity and single-minded devotion to duty, have set a standard for all servants of the international community--and especially, of course for his successors--which is simply impossible to live up to. There can be no better rule of thumb for a Secretary- General, as he approaches each new challenge or crisis, than to ask himself, ``how would Hammarskjold have handled this?'' If that is true for any Secretary-General, how much more so for one of my generation, who came of age during the years when Hammarskjold personified the United Nations, and began my own career in the UN system within a year of his death. And how much more true, also, for one who has the special relationship that I do with this, his home country! So you see, it is quite a solemn thing for me to give this lecture, especially so close to the 40th anniversary of Hammarskjold's death. And I feel all the more solemn about it coming here, as I do, directly from the part of Africa where he met that death--and where, 40 years later, the United Nations is again struggling to help restore unity and peace to the Democratic Republic of Congo. I can tell you that the Congolese have never forgotten Dag Hammarskjold. Four days ago, during my visit to the Congo, I met with representatives of the parties involved in the Inter-Congolese Dialogue. Their spokesman began the meeting by telling me how much they appreciated the late Secretary- General's dedication, and the fact that he gave his life for peace in their country. And he asked us to pay tribute to Hammarskjold's memory by observing a minute of silence. I found it very moving that people could feel like that about him after 40 years. In Zambia, too--which, as you know, was where he actually died-- Hammarskjold's death is commemorated annually. The Zambian government, together with your own and with the United Nations system, has launched a ``living memorial'', which includes a programme to educate young Africans as ``messengers of peace'', as well as a Centre for Peace, Good Governance and Human Rights. There could be no better way to commemorate him than by promoting these ideals, which he held so dear. If Dag Hammarskjold were to walk through that door now, and ask me what are the main problems the United Nations is dealing with today, I could easily answer in a way that would make him think nothing much had changed. I could talk to him not only about the Congo, but about the Middle East, or Cyprus, or the relations between India and Pakistan, and it would all seem very familiar. But I could also tell him things that he would find very unfamiliar--though some would surprise him less than others, and some would gratify him more than others. He would probably be relieved, but not surprised, to hear that China is now represented at the United Nations by the government that actually governs the vast majority of Chinese people. It would surprise him much more to learn that the Soviet Union no longer exists. But he could only be pleased to find that there is no longer an unbridgeable ideological difference between the permanent members of the Security Council. He might be struck by the number of conflicts the United Nations is dealing with today that are within, rather than between, States--though the experience of the Congo would have prepared him for this--and also by the number of regional organisations that have developed as partners for the UN in different parts of the world. I feel sure, in any case, that he would be pleased to see the way United Nations peacekeeping has developed, from the model that he and Lester Pearson so brilliantly improvised in 1956 to something much more diverse and complex, which is often more accurately described as ``peace building''. And I imagine he would be equally impressed by the wide range of issues that the United Nations is now called upon to face outside the traditional security arena--from climate change to HIV/AIDS. He would be gratified, and perhaps not all that surprised, to hear that human rights and democracy are now generally accepted as world norms--though he might well be distressed to see how far, in many countries, the practice still falls short of the rhetoric. He would definitely be distressed to learn that, within the last decade, genocide had again disfigured the face of humanity--and that well over a billion people today are living in extreme poverty. I think he would see preventing the recurrence of the former, and putting an end to the latter, as the most urgent tasks confronting us in this new century. He would no doubt be impressed by the speed and intensity of modem communications, and momentarily confused by talk of faxes and sat-phones--let alone e-mails and the Internet. But I'm sure he would be quick to grasp the advantages and disadvantages of all these innovations, both for civilisation as a whole and for the conduct of diplomacy in particular. What is clear is that his core ideas remain highly relevant in this new international context. The challenge for us is to see how they can be adapted to take account of it. One idea which inspired all his words and actions as Secretary-General was his belief that the United Nations had to be a ``dynamic instrument'', through which its Members would collectively ``develop forms of executive action''. During his time in office he became increasingly sensitive to the fact that some Member States did not share this vision, but regarded the United Nations as only ``a static conference machinery for resolving conflicts of interests and ideologies with a view to peaceful coexistence''. In the Introduction to his last Annual Report--a magisterial work, which reads almost as if he was consciously writing his political testament--Hammarskjold argued that those who regarded the Organization in this way were not paying adequate attention to certain essential principles of the Charter. He showed that the Charter clearly implies the existence of ``an international community, for which the Organization is an instrument and an expression''. The overriding purpose of this community was to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, and to do this it had to follow certain key principles. These were: First, ``equal political rights''--which encompassed both the ``sovereign equality'' of all Member States, in Article 2 of the Charter, and ``respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms'', in Article 1. Second, ``equal economic opportunities''--spelt out in Article 55 as the promotion of ``higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development'', as well as ``solutions of international economic, social, health, and related problems''. Third, ``justice''--by which he meant that the international community must be ``based on law . . . with a judicial procedure through which law and justice could be made to apply''. And finally the prohibition of the use of armed force, ``save in the common interest''. These principles, Hammarskjold argued, are incompatible with the idea of the United Nations as merely a conference or debating chamber--as indeed is the authority the Charter gives to its principal organs, and particularly to the Security Council, which clearly has both legislative and executive powers. The context in which he put forward these arguments was, of course, the Cold War, and particularly the Soviet campaign against him during the Congo crisis of 1960-61. That campaign is happily long past. But we still face, from time to time, attempts by Member States to reduce the United Nations to a ``conference mechanism''. Those attempts no longer come systematically from one particular ideological camp. Instead, they tend to vary according to the subject under discussion. Broadly speaking, industrialised countries remain reluctant to see the United Nations act on Hammarskjold's second principle--the promotion of ``equal economic opportunities''. And the governments of some other countries are equally loath to see it actively promote ``respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all''. In both cases, I believe the Secretary-General has no choice. He has to follow in the footsteps of Hammarskold, upholding the right and duty of the United Nations to pursue the aims laid down for it by the Charter. Of course there is always a need for negotiation and discussion on the appropriate forms of action. But the United Nations will fail in its duty to the world's peoples, who are the ultimate source of its authority, if it allows itself to be reduced to a mere ``static conference'', whether on economic and social rights or on civil and political ones. The same applies to Hammarskjold's exalted view of the ``international civil servant'', which he also pursued in that last annual report, and in a lecture given that same summer at Oxford University. His argument here was that the people charged with carrying out the executive functions of the United Nations could not be neutral in relation to the principles of the Charter. Nor could they be regarded, or allowed to regard themselves, as nominees or representatives of their own nations. They had to represent the international community as a whole. Here too, Hammarskjold based his argument on a very careful reading of the Charter itself--in this case Articles 100 and 10 1. Article 100 forbids the Secretary-General or any of his staff either to seek or to receive instructions from States, And Article 101 prescribes ``the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity'' as ``the paramount consideration in the employment of the staff''. Once again, Hammarskjold was arguing in the context of the Cold War, in which first one side and then the other had tried to insist on the right to be represented, within the Secretariat, by people who were loyal to its political or ideological point of view. Again, the context has changed, and I am glad to say that States today, while extremely keen to see their nationals appointed to senior positions, no longer seek--or at least, not in the same way--to exercise political control over them, once appointed. But the principle of an independent international civil service, to which Harnmarskjold was so attached, remains as important as ever. Each successive Secretary-General must be vigilant in defending it, even if, on occasion, changing times require us to depart from the letter of his views, in order to preserve the spirit. To give just one example: Hammarskjold insisted that the bulk of United Nations staff should have permanent appointments and expect to spend their whole career with the Organisation. That may have been appropriate in his time. It is less so now that the role of the United Nations has expanded, and more than half of our employees are serving in missions in the field. This is a development which Hammarskjold would surely have welcomed, since it reflects a transition from the ``static conference'' model to the ``dynamic instrument'' model which he so strongly believed in. But what is clear is that his ideal of the United Nations as an expression of the international community, whose staff carry out decisions taken by States collectively rather than bending to the will of any one of them, is just as relevant in our times as in his. And that, of course, has very important implications for the role of the Secretary-General himself. Hammarskjold pointed out that Article 99 of the Charter-- which allows the Secretary-General, on his own initiative, to bring matters to the Security Council's attention when in his view they may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security--makes him clearly a political rather than a purely administrative official. In practice, successive Secretaries-General, including Hammarskjold, have invoked this article very sparingly. I myself have never yet found it necessary to do so. But the fact that the Secretary-General has this power crucially affects the way he is treated by the Security Council, and by the Member States in general. Few people now question the responsibility of the Secretary-General to act politically, or to make public pronouncements on political issues. In fact, the boot today is if anything on the other foot: I find myself called on to make official statements on almost everything that happens in the world, from royal marriages to the possibility of human cloning! I do my best to satisfy this demand with due respect for the decisions of the Security Council and General Assembly. But those bodies would find it very strange if on each occasion I sought their approval before opening my mouth! Their members can, and do, take exception to some of my statements--and thank goodness they do. There must be freedom of speech for governments, as well as for international officials! But they do not question my right to make such statements, according to my own understanding of the purposes and principles of the United Nations as set out in the Charter. No doubt Dag Hammarskjold would also disagree with some of the specific positions I have taken. But I suspect he would envy me the discretion I enjoy in deciding what to say. And I have no doubt he would strongly endorse the principle that the Secretary-General must strive to make himself an authentic and independent voice of the international community. What he might not have foreseen is the way our concept of that community has developed in recent years. In his time it was essentially a community of separate nations or peoples, who for all practical purposes were represented by States. So if we go back to the things about today's world that we would have to explain to him, if he unexpectedly joined us now, probably the most difficult for him to adjust to would be the sheer complexity of a world in which individuals and groups of all kinds are constantly interacting--across frontiers and across oceans, economically, socially and culturally--without expecting or receiving any permission, let alone assistance, from their national governments. He might well find it difficult to identify the precise role, in such a world, of a body like the United Nations, whose Charter presupposes the division of the world into sovereign and equal States, and in which the peoples of the world are represented essentially by their governments. He might find that difficult--and if so, he would not be alone! But I am convinced he would relish the challenge. And I am sure he would not stray from his fundamental conviction that the essential task of the United Nations is to protect the weak against the strong. In the long term, the vitality and viability of the Organization depend on its ability to perform that task, by adapting itself to changing realities. That, I believe, is the biggest test it faces in the new century. How would Hammarskjold approach that task? First of all he would insist, quite correctly, that States are still the main holders of political authority in the world, and are likely to remain so. Indeed, the more democratic they become--the more genuinely representative of, and accountable to, their peoples--the greater also will be their political legitimacy. And therefore it is entirely proper, as well as inevitable, that they will remain the political masters of the United Nations. He would also insist, I am sure, on the continuing responsibility of States to maintain international order-- and, indeed, on their collective responsibility, which their leaders solemnly recognised in last year's Millennium Declaration, ``to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level''. And he might well say that, with a few honourable exceptions, the more fortunate countries in this world are not living up to that responsibility, so long as they do not fulfill their longstanding commitments to much higher levels of development assistance, to much more generous debt relief, and to duty- and quota- free access for exports from the least developed countries. But then he would also see that his own lifetime coincided, in most countries, with the high watermark of State control over the lives of citizens. And he would see that States today generally tax and spend a smaller proportion of their citizens' wealth than they did 40 years ago. From this he might well conclude that we should not rely exclusively on State action to achieve our objectives on the international level, either. A great deal, he would think, is likely to depend on non- State actors in the system--private companies, voluntary agencies or pressure groups, philanthropic foundations, universities and think tanks, and, of course, creative individuals. And that thought would surely feed into his reflection on the role of the United Nations. Can it confine itself, in the 21st century, to the role of coordinating action by States? Or should it reach out further? Is it not obliged, in order to fulfill the purposes of the Charter, to form partnerships with all these different actors? To listen to them, to guide them, and to urge them on? Above all, to provide a framework of shared values and understanding, within which their free and voluntary efforts can interact, and reinforce each other, instead of getting in each other's way? Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to suggest that this would be part of Hammarskjold's vision of the role of the United Nations in the 21st century--because it is, of course, my own vision. No doubt if he were alive today he would offer us something nobler and more profound. But I like to think, Ladies and Gentlemen, that what I have just described would find some place in it. Thank you very much.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Madam Chairman, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) and I began with an amendment of $920 million to be taken out of ballistic missile defense and transferred into a pay raise, family housing, homeland defense, and counterproliferation, all urgent needs, none of which is fully met. It became apparent to us, particularly after September 11, that we were not going to be able to sell an amendment cutting this amount. So we, in the spirit of bipartisanship, made a deal. We agreed to lower the amount of the amendment to $400 million, of which $135 million had already been cut or reduced by the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), the chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over this matter. That left $265 million to be taken from basically two places in the BMDO budget. First of all we took $120 million out of space-based lasers. Why? To put it in common parlance, we are simply saying, walk before you run. We have got an airborne laser system which has yet to prove itself. We should prove that technology on an airborne platform before we try to put it in outer space. This is a futuristic system, way over the horizon. Ballistic missile defense does not lose anything at all by that cut. Secondly, we took $145 million out of mid-course systems and particularly out of sea-based mid-course systems. Why? The Navy has two systems now which are ship based. One is an area-wide system called ``lower tier,'' the other is a theater-wide system called ``upper tier.'' The area-wide system has just been slipped 20 months. The upper tier system has yet to make the first intercept. We are simply saying again, walk before you run, and, for goodness sake, do not start up a proliferation of programs that cannot be sustained in follow-on budgets. So we would trim there. We made the cuts discreetly. We did not make hand-fisted, meat-ax cuts; we made discrete cuts that will allow this program to go forward more, I think more efficiently and more effectively. Where did we put the money? Well, September 11 caught us nodding, and it also caught us focused on a threat, almost fixated on this threat, and ignoring other threats. So taking a page, a cue from the lesson of September 11, we took this $400 million and put $100 million into intelligence programs, $150 million into antiterrorism initiatives, $100 million into counterterrorism initiatives, and $50 million into consequence-management activities, the kind of activities that will have to occur in the wake of the next tragedy, God forbid that there be one. So we have made the cuts wisely and discretely. We have made the allocation of the savings wisely as well. This is a good compromise, it is a good amendment. I urge support for it. Madam Chairman, on September 6, 2001, Ranking Member Ike Skelton and I filed an amendment with the Rules Committee affecting the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) title of H.R. 2586, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002. The amendment would have taken less than one-third, $918 million, out of the $3 billion increase proposed for BMDO and transferred the money to three areas of urgent national security interest: $450 million for an additional 1 percent pay raise for military personnel; $250 million to address the most pressing family housing improvement needs; and $219 million for homeland defense and counter-proliferation efforts. Even with our amendment, spending on ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs would have increased next year by $2 billion to $7.3 billion, or 38 percent. The largest cut in our amendment as originally filed would have come from Fort Greely, Alaska, and here's why: Greely is said to be part of the Pacific test bed, but in truth, no missiles can be launched and tested from the silos at Fort Greely, as the booster stages would separate and drop over populated areas. The booster on the missiles to be based at Fort Greely is not the objective booster; it's an improvised Minuteman booster. The kinetic kill vehicle that sits atop the booster is also a test article, far from being proven. Its configuration will surely change as a result of testing before the final production design is selected. The site at Fort Greely lacks an X-band radar for tracking incoming re-entry vehicles and guiding the interceptors as they close on their targets; a radar with this kind of range and resolution is essential to a mid-course intercept system. Finally, the system of Low-Earth Orbit, Space-Based Infrared Sensors known as ``SBIRS-Low'' is still years away from being deployed; any ground-based intercept system without X-band radar and SBIRS-Low is going to be an extremely limited system. BMDO argues that the 5 interceptors at Ft. Greely may give us an ``early capability'' against an emerging threat. But with test article components and a subpar radar, this system will have little, if any, utility against a threat launched against the West Coast of the United States, and BMDO freely admits it will have no capability whatsoever against a missile launched at the East Coast. I felt then that given the unmet needs in this budget, it was not wise to sink so much money into these silos, for such little gain. Frankly, I continue to believe that. However, in the wake of the horrible events of September 11th, Members on both sides of the aisle have come together to seek a compromise on this issue. We have agreed not to cut funding for Ft. Greely, but in truth, many on this side of the aisle continue to have concerns about that proposal. In the interest of bipartisanship, we are putting aside this issue today, but I expect that we will revisit this issue in the next budget cycle. As a result, the amount of the cut contained in the compromise amendment is far below the level contained in the Skelton- Spratt amendment. However, two important elements of our original amendment have been largely preserved. I want to thank Chairman Stump for his willingness to work on this with us. The compromise makes a total cut below the President's request for BMDO of $400 million. $120 million of this total is taken from Space- Based Programs. This is the same amount as was cut by the Skelton- Spratt amendment, and reflects the good government logic that this immature technology should be funded only at a concept development level. Another $145 million is taken from the Mid-Course Intercept program. I argued for this cut to come out of Sea-Based Mid Course intercept, which is where the Skelton-Spratt amendment would have taken it, but the agreement leaves the cut less specific. I believe the cut should be made out of the Sea-Based NMD account, and it is my hope we can make the cut more specific at a future time. A sea-based mid-course defense would entail an entirely new NMD platform, and before embarking on such an effort, BMDO should first demonstrate the maturity of the Navy's theater defense programs, which are technically less demanding. At present, however, the Navy Area Wide program has seen its schedule slip by 20 months, and the Navy Theater Wide program has yet to have a successful intercept. Until these simpler technological hurdles are cleared, it does not make sense to pour hundreds of millions into an even more challenging, and even less mature system like sea-based NMD. The balance of the $400 million is a cut of $135 million, based on the grounds that the funding could not be executed wisely in 2002. I have been saying for many years now that Congress needs to stop treating missile defense like a political totem. And while this compromise is disappointing to many on both sides, perhaps it represents a small step in that direction. I urge my colleagues to support the Stump-Skelton amendment.