C. Young

Mr. YOUNG of Florida

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I think I explained this once before but I would be happy to do it again. The emergency designation was established by our own Budget Impoundment and Control Act, or whatever it is referred to as these days, and it does provide for an emergency designation, that if the Congress determines there is an emergency and if the President signs off and agrees that it is an emergency, then the monies appropriated do not have to be offset.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I want to say to my friend from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) I know the sincerity of what he is doing, and what he and I are trying to do is not that different. The only real difference is the source of the offsets. Let me explain again. Because when the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) was speaking, he confused what I was trying to do. But let me reiterate what it is that the committee bill is trying to do here. The offsets that we recommend in this bill are monies that have been appropriated, and most of the money for those programs will be spent in fiscal year 1999. But portions of that appropriated money, money that has already been appropriated, will not be obligated in fiscal year 1999. And because this is ``no-year money'', if you allow me to use that phrase that appropriators use and budgeters use, ``no-year money,'' those funds will eventually end up being spent somewhere. So we are just going to take advantage of those unobligated funds and use them now to meet this emergency. Then I would like to say to my friend from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) that should a real emergency arrive in agricultural areas of our country, I can assure him, as chairman of this committee, that we will respond quickly to any request from Members or from the administration that would deal with any emergency in agriculture or any other emergency, for that matter, in the United States.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman from Kansas will continue to yield, I am glad to hear the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) joins us in opposition to the Stenholm amendment. I would also like to say to my friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr), and incidentally the gentleman from California was part of the delegation who went to Central America at my request a week and a half ago, and came back with a very glowing report. And I can understand why he would want to appropriate these monies without offsetting, and I think that that sentiment would run through this House. This is a true emergency. But the problem is the leaders of the party of the gentleman from California in the House and in the Senate, the leaders of my party in the House and in the Senate, and the leader of the free world at the White House, the President of the United States, have all said we are going to live within the 1997 budget caps. And I say to my colleagues that unless we get serious about making offsets on some of these programs, we are not going to satisfy the President nor our own leaders in the House or the Senate, because we just cannot get to the 1997 budget caps unless we are willing to make some tough choices in offsetting some of the spending. I appreciate my friend from Kansas yielding to me, and I appreciate the work that he does as a member of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. I am glad to hear that.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. My friend, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey), and I have sometimes misunderstood each other, and I want to make sure that he does not misunderstand what I am saying about the offsets. Yes, these offsets are real, but they are offsets from funds that were not going to be obligated in fiscal year 1999 anyway. So they are real, and the fact that they were not going to be obligated says that we are not really damaging those programs. But now when the gentleman from Wisconsin talks about how we are supporting two different versions of something at the same time, I have been sitting here wondering what he means. The gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) is strongly against offsetting the emergency funding in this bill, but at the same time he is supporting the amendment by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) that eliminates the declaration of emergency as he proceeds to get an across-the-board cut. That is where I am a little confused with his position.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman very much for that. His credentials in attempting to be very careful and responsible with the taxpayers' money is certainly well known throughout the Congress. But I would have to say, and the reason that I oppose the gentleman's amendment is that the committee was very careful in working with all of the subcommittees to find these offsets of unobligated funds that would not be spent in fiscal year 1999; and if they were spent in 1999, they might find their way into some wasteful spending program in the following year. So the money was not going to be spent this year. The committee and the Congress should make these decisions. But across-the-board cuts are, frankly, the easy way out. Any time we have a problem with paying for a supplemental or reducing spending, putting an across-the-board amendment up is the easy way to go, but that takes the Congress out of the procedure. When we are doing an across-the-board cut, then the administration and the agencies, they will decide where to make those cuts. Frankly, I do not want to give up the responsibility that the American people have given the Congress in our Constitution, to be responsible for the appropriated funds and the appropriation of those funds. So, on that basis, I really have to object to the gentleman's amendment and suggest that we stay with the offsets that have been identified, that have been studied, that have been thoroughly scrubbed and are responsible offsets rather than relying on an across-the-board cut.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. I am happy to yield to the gentleman.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm). Mr. Chairman, as I read this, what he is striking is from line 9 to 12, striking ``Provided, That the entire amount is designated by the Congress as an emergency requirement'', and it goes on to give the citations of the referenced Budget Act. I am not exactly sure what the gentleman is trying to accomplish here, except I believe what he wants to do is to eliminate the offsets that we have suggested from the Committee on Appropriations and replace them with an across-the-board cut.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I must reluctantly object to the unanimous consent request, and we will go by the regular order.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I do insist on my point of order.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I make a point of order against the amendment. It violates the rules of the House as it in effect calls for the en bloc consideration of two different paragraphs in the bill. The precedents of the House are clear in this matter. Amendments to a paragraph or section are not in order until such paragraph or section has been read. This is Cannons Precedents, volume 8, section 2354.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order on the amendment.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, to close the general debate part of the consideration of this bill, the issue has been raised about whether or not we should use the emergency declaration. This is a technical argument. The truth of the matter is we are responding to an emergency. The only difference is we are going to pay for it. We are going to offset our response to this emergency, but it truly is an emergency to which we are responding to. I do not see why anybody should be really upset about leaving that part of the language in the bill. It is truly an emergency. We are just being fiscally responsible, and we are going to offset it. One of the discussions that has been of some concern to all of us is the issue of the purchase of plutonium from the Soviet Union. I want to tell Members about this fund. This was a fund of $525 million for the two Russian programs, $325 million for highly enriched uranium, and $200 million for plutonium disposition. By the way, we spend a lot of money in programs like this, but this particular aspect was not high on anybody's radar screen. In the omnibus appropriations bill we dealt with last year, there were so many members and so many people in the administration having input into that bill, this issue was never part of the original consideration. It did not come down here from the White House or the Department of Defense or the State Department. As a matter of fact, the only time it was actually raised was when we went to the conference committee with the other body. At that point, one member of the Senate offered the amendment to create this program and appropriate this money. We thought it was a pretty good idea. We still think it is a pretty good idea. But I would remind my colleagues that this fiscal year is basically half over, so most of that money would not be spent, anyway. Second, I would remind my colleagues that the agreement that we were to reach with Russia on this issue to make way for spending this money has never been concluded. In fact, yesterday Prime Minister Primakov was on his way to the United States. One of the things we thought that he would do while he was here was to complete the negotiation on highly enriched uranium portion of the agreement and sign it. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean Prime Minister Primakov decided, after a conversation with Vice President Gore, he decided not to come to the United States, and he turned around and went back home. So to this day, to this minute, no part of agreement has been signed. What did we do? Of the $525 million that had been appropriated, we only rescind $150 million. I will remind the gentleman, the agreement is not concluded nor signed, and the fiscal year is halfway over. But we left $375 million in this fund that no one even wanted or suggested until we got into the conference committee. So I do not think this is a serious problem that anybody should be concerned about. As I said, we took a little extra time to prepare this bill, to bring it to the committee, and to bring it to the Floor because we wanted to be responsible. We wanted to be fiscally conservative. We wanted to make sure that the money, the funds that we used to offset these emergencies, would not do severe damage to any of the programs that we dealt with. So we went through the account, page by page by page, to find unobligated balances, monies that would not be spent in fiscal year 1999 anyway. That is where the list of rescissions came from. I submit to all of the Members, and I understand we have differences, there are 435 of us, we are always going to have some differences, that this is a good, a responsible, conservative bill that meets the criteria of responding to an emergency, at the same time being extremely careful with the taxpayers' dollars that we have an obligation to be responsible for. In closing, Mr. Chairman, I suggest that we should pass this bill. We should respond to the emergency. We should help our friends in Central America, and we should repay to our own military the monies that they have already spent in the performance of their emergency duties at the time of the hurricane and at the time of the natural disasters.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, in responding to the gentleman from Michigan, he is correct. I have discussed this issue with not only the Department of Defense and the Committee on Armed Services, but also the chairman of our Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on Appropriations, the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis). We all agree that the Senate's language is not controversial, and would in fact be useful. On that basis, we are certainly prepared to agree to it when we go to conference.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Latham), a member of the committee.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Sabo).

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I am reluctant to engage in this particular argument now because of the great respect that I have for the minority leader, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt). But I want to say to my colleagues, there is nothing in this bill that would have an adverse effect on the security of our Nation. Those who have known me during the 4 years that I chaired the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense know that I have fought and struggled to do everything that I possibly could to improve the national security of our Nation and improve the quality of life for those men and women who provide the security of our Nation. I know what he is talking about. We will discuss that more after the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) offers his amendment, but there is absolutely zero threat to our national security in this bill. In response to the complaints about how much time it has taken to get here, we tried to do this in a responsible way. The agricultural money that was just mentioned was requested on March 1. Today is only March 24. That is 23 days ago. So I think we have expedited it fairly well, but one of the reasons we did not come out here on the floor immediately was that I wanted to see firsthand exactly from the congressional standpoint what had happened and what had occurred in the region. I asked a bipartisan delegation from the Committee on Appropriations to visit the region, which they did the weekend before we did our markup. They came back with a very real report on what the needs were, what the requirements were. General Wilhelm, commander of Southern Command, who also accompanied them on that trip, pointed out what our own military had done in response to that national disaster. So, yes, we did take a little time to be responsible, to find out for ourselves what the situation was in Central America, and to make sure that the offsets that we recommended were responsible offsets. I will talk more about the offsets when we get into the amendment process here, but we can justify making these offsets because they were not going to be spent in fiscal year 1999 anyway, and if they were left they would have probably eventually been wasted in the future. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton).

Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the very distinguished gentleman from Delaware (Mr. Castle).