Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise to offer a commonsense amendment that redirects funds from EPA bureaucracy to the Forest Services' hazardous fuels account in order to prevent dangerous wildfires. In 2015, over 10 million acres burned throughout the country, setting a new record. In that same year, fire season appropriations requests were approximately $4 billion for all wildfire programs. Shamefully, the President requested only $356 million of those funds go toward hazardous fuels reduction activities. Thinning overgrown forests and removing hazardous fuels creates jobs and increases overall forest health. Unfortunately, extremist self- interest groups and Washington bureaucrats have failed to recognize this correlation. As a result, timber harvests are down 80 percent over the last 30 years. Such flawed thinking also negatively impacts education and local communities. Historically, 25 percent of the receipts from timber harvests by the Federal Government go toward schools and important infrastructure projects. The failure to prioritize hazardous fuels reduction activities is also bad for our environment, as sound data from NASA concludes that one catastrophic wildfire can emit more carbon emissions in a few days than total emissions in an entire State over the course of a year.…”