Jeff Flake: “Let me just say there is over at the Department of Agriculture something called the Agricultural Research Service, or…”

“Let me just say there is over at the Department of Agriculture something called the Agricultural Research Service, or ARS, account, and it is being funded at over $1 billion for fiscal year 2008. Now, we may not like the programs they choose to fund. If we don't like it and we don't think they have a good process, we should exercise the oversight that we are supposed to exercise and change it. But to circumvent that process and say because you may not have given us a grant in one particular year then we are simply going to go around you and earmark, that simply seems wrong. We are getting away from the authorization, appropriation, oversight program and process that has been the hallmark of this Congress forever. With earmarking, the contemporary process of earmarking, we are circumventing that and we do very little oversight of the Federal agencies, because we are seeking to compete with them. We set up a program over there and we say you have a merit-based program, a competitive grant program, and then, when they don't choose what we want to, we circumvent it.”