Political Quotes

“If I could respond to that, to some extent, it is a chicken- and-egg proposition. You have to have an authorization before you can have an appropriation. And the administration merely has the benefit of both. It can put something in the budget which then encourages us to do an authorization or it can respond to an authorization which the Congress passes. The intent here, since we have been working with the administration, is for the Congress to authorize a program which the administration then is supposed to carry out, and that would include an inclusion in the next budget of an amount of money sufficient to fund the authorization that we provide. Then the chairman of the Appropriations Committee would have the jurisdiction to determine how much of that to fund in the appropriations request. But the idea here is to authorize the program, which gives direction to the administration as to what we want it to do. Hopefully, that direction would be then to include that money in the budget. I certainly would be encouraging them to do that.”