John Doolittle: “We already have one-third of the entire land base in the country owned by the Federal government. Now they are asking us…”

“We already have one-third of the entire land base in the country owned by the Federal government. Now they are asking us to appropriate $900 million or more annually to buy more of it. We are not good managers in the Federal government of the land we already have. There is a $12 billion backlog in maintenance already. I ask Members to visit their National Parks and check out the condition of some of the facilities. Whenever we raise this with the Park Service bureaucrats, the answer we get back is, oh, gee, we do not have enough money. Now we are going to give even more money to buy more land. This bill does put some money in for maintenance, that is true, but it puts nearly three times as much money into new land acquisition. Once that land is acquired, it has to be maintained. We are doing a terrible job of that as a Federal government. One illustration, the General Accounting Office said that there are 39 million acres of Forest Service land that are at extreme risk of catastrophic forest fire. That is because that land is not being managed properly.”