Ed Royce: “This program, Radio Free Asia, was due to expire, under existing law, in September. And I am delighted here, for several…”

“This program, Radio Free Asia, was due to expire, under existing law, in September. And I am delighted here, for several reasons, that the legislation is before us. One is because, on a strategic level, if you have this sunset and you have authoritarian regimes presuming that at the end of the year RFA's broadcasts are going to be discontinued, it implies that it does not have the full support of the U.S. Government or our people here in the United States. And in some countries there's even been talk of RFA going out of business. This sends the message that that just isn't so because now RFA will permanently be in business. And from a practical standpoint, what does that mean? If you're running a station, it means that you've got the ability now to contract effectively in long-range leases. You get the capital agreements that you need. You are better able, less expensively, to run these operations. It's not that these operations are expensive. As my friend, John Kasich, former chairman of the Budget Committee once said, the price of this is the price of a fuel cap on a B-52. But, oh, how effective, oh, how effective this strategy has been over the years, because what we provide here is surrogate news.…”