C. W. Bill Young: “I want to first compliment Chairman Hobson for having done an outstanding job in preparing this bill along with his…”

“I want to first compliment Chairman Hobson for having done an outstanding job in preparing this bill along with his ranking member, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Visclosky). One can tell from the way the markups in the subcommittee and the full committee went that they obviously did their work very effectively and have produced a really good bill. I wanted to take just a couple of minutes to give the Members a bit of a status report on where we are with appropriations and what they can expect in the next couple of weeks. For example, from the time we received the President's budget request in February until we received the deeming resolution on the budget on May 19, the Committee on Appropriations and our 13 subcommittees held nearly 300 oversight hearings that were very lengthy and very thorough. Since May 19 when the budget was deemed, there have been 16 legislative days. In those 16 legislative days, the committee marked up eight bills in subcommittee and seven bills in full committee. When we pass this bill today, we will have passed four bills in the House and sent them to the other body. When we reconvene the week after next, we will mark up two more bills in subcommittee, the District of Columbia and Military Construction bills. We will also consider Military Construction and Foreign Operations in the full committee. So we are preparing a queue of bills to move through the House.”