Speeches
|
|
Print this page |
Floor Statement on the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Bill for FY'02
November 1, 2001
Washington, D.C.- Today Senator John McCain spoke on the floor of the United States Senate regarding the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Bill for FY’02, and gave the following remarks:Mr. President, I want to thank the conferees of this bill for their hard work in completing the conference report for this legislation. The report provides federal funding for numerous vital programs in the Treasury Department and the General Government. However, once again, I find myself in the unpleasant position of speaking before my colleagues about parochial projects in another conference report.
This conference report spends at a level 6.3 percent higher than the level enacted in fiscal year 2001. In real dollars, this is $458 million in additional spending above the amount requested by the President, and a $1.9 billion increase in spending from last year. I must remind my colleagues that the Administration has urged us to maintain our fiscal discipline to ensure that we will continue to have adequate funds to prosecute our war against terrorism, to aid those in need, and to cover other related costs.
In this bill, I have identified $217 million in earmarks, which is less than the cost of the earmarks in the bill passed last year, which totaled $356 million. Therefore, I applaud the efforts of the conferees in keeping parochial spending to a minimum in this bill but more must be done.
While the amounts associated with each individual earmark may not seem extravagant, taken together, they represent a serious diversion of taxpayers' hard-earned dollars at the expense of numerous programs that have undergone the appropriate merit-based selection process. It is my view that the people who run these programs should be the ones who decide how best to spend the appropriated funds. After all, they know what their most pressing needs are.
For example, under funding for the Department of Treasury, some examples of earmarks include:
* $2,000,000 as a grant to Florida International University for transfer pricing research;
* $3,500,000 for retrofitting and upgrades of the National Center Tracing Center Facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia; and
* $750,000 for the Center for Agriculture Policy and Trade Studies located at North Dakota State University.
Under funding for the General Government, some of the earmarks include:
* $ 1,000,000 for the Native American Digital Telehealth Project and the Upper Great Plains Native American Telehealth Program at the University of North Dakota; $3,000,000 to help purchase land and facilitate the moving of the Odd Fellows Hall to provide for construction of a new courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah; and
* $1,700,000 for a grant to the Oklahoma Centennial Commission.
There are more projects on the list that I have compiled, which will be available on my Senate Website.
In closing, I urge my colleagues to curb our habit of directing hard-earned taxpayer dollars to locality-specific special interests.
# # #
|