Victor Fazio: “I have been fortunate to serve on this subcommittee for 19 years, and I must say I have always enjoyed the bipartisan…”

“I have been fortunate to serve on this subcommittee for 19 years, and I must say I have always enjoyed the bipartisan atmosphere in which the work has been conducted. Tom Bevill and John Myers were the senior members of each party for almost all the time that I have served on this committee, but my years with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. McDade) have been particularly gratifying and enjoyable. He is the wonderful guy we have heard him described as by so many colleagues today. We obviously have a very tough bill. This is not a bill we have enjoyed bringing to the floor, because it is significantly below what we would like to spend in light of what we spent in the last year. What I mean by that is there are many, many worthy projects that have not been funded in this bill because we simply have not been given the allocation. We all understand that that will be the case for the future. I hope to, in a few minutes, using some charts, point out the degree to which discretionary spending has been reduced across the spectrum.”