Jeff Flake: “yesterday we had quite a discussion on this bill. There were efforts to move money from paying for the census, for…”

“yesterday we had quite a discussion on this bill. There were efforts to move money from paying for the census, for example, to other areas of the bill or other priorities. There was a lot of talk about limited resources and the limited amount of money in this bill and the need to take money from one area to put into another. I would submit that one area that we can take some money from that is overfunded, grossly overfunded, in this bill is in some of these earmarks. Now, I will maybe highlight 10 of them today, but there are literally hundreds in the bill that we could take the money from to fund our constitutional obligation, for example, to conduct the census every 10 years. But I will start today with 250,000 for the Rochester, New York, Tooling and Machining Association for a workforce development program; that is an earmark. This amendment would strip that funding. The Rochester Tool and Machining Association is one chapter of a larger international tooling and machining association, which is the national representative of the custom precision manufacturing industry in the United States. They maintain a legislative alert center on their Web site so their members can lobby Congress on issues that matter to them. They also retain a lobbying firm to advance their interests with the Federal Government. It would seem that they are doing yeoman's work for their members, as is their Rochester chapter.…”