Sam Farr: “My colleague and chair, Mr. Aderholt, just said that this bill is necessary because funding for the FDA is necessary.…”

“My colleague and chair, Mr. Aderholt, just said that this bill is necessary because funding for the FDA is necessary. He's absolutely right, but this bill doesn't do all that. You cannot just fund one component of government and not have the rest of government. FDA is the Food and Drug Administration. It relies heavily on the Centers for Disease Control. You do nothing to fund the Centers for Disease Control. So as just one critical component of the Federal Government, it isn't the Federal Government, and that's what has been shut down, and so I adamantly oppose this legislation. We have been here a number of days now with the government shut down because people are trying to use the appropriations process, which is, as every schoolchild knows, the process where the President asks and then the Congress disposes, and we use the Appropriations Committee to dispose; that is, we make the decisions on how much is going to be spent by each agency. The President came to Congress asking for $1.2 trillion in expenditures. The Republicans rejected that in their budget and came up with a much less budgeted number of $967 billion. This bill on the floor, the big bill, has the Democrats agreeing to $986 billion. That's a $200 billion reduction. That's just amazing. I don't think this has ever been done before where that big of a cut has been made to the Federal Government, and yet we can't pass it.…”