Katie Porter: “Mr. Chairman, I want the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McIntosh] to understand what we have done in the bill with respect…”

“Mr. Chairman, I want the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McIntosh] to understand what we have done in the bill with respect to the salary and expense accounts. That is, generally, we have provided about a 2-percent increase in S&E accounts, and this account is 2.8 percent, both figures are below the rate of increase in the spending in the bill overall. The President has announced that salary increases will be 3.8 percent for 1998. That increase means that in all of the salary and expense accounts in the bill there will be a need to either cut expenses or have fewer employees, probably mostly through attrition, to meet those requirements. In other words, the level of increase that we have given in this account is below the rate of increase in salaries in the Federal Government generally, and that will mean fewer workers will remain in the Federal work force. That would apply in this account as well.”