On the recordJuly 6, 2011
This is a very simple amendment. Basically, I am taking 16 million, not billion, $16 million from a part of the Department of Defense budget, which is called defense-wide appropriations, where there's almost 20 billion. So I'm asking to take roughly .0008, or .08 percent, from this defense-wide appropriations which is used for other than military departments. So it is not even applicable to the Army, Navy, and Air Force, not the military departments, but it is used by the Secretary of Defense for the maintenance, lease, and operation of facilities and equipment. And what I'm doing is taking this $16 million and I'm transferring it to the Peer-Reviewed Prostate Cancer Research Program. Funding levels, my colleagues, for this program, has gone down dramatically since 2001. Right now, it's funded at $64 million. It was funded in 2001 at 100. It has continually come down and down and down. So I'm not asking to take it up to the 2001 level; I'm just asking to take it up to perhaps what it was in 2005. {time} 1600 I think, without going into all of the details, this is a very wise move because funding levels for this program have continually decreased, yet prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of male cancer-related death in the United States, with an estimated 27,360 casualties just last year. There are no noticeable symptoms in early stages. The use of widespread testing, however, has led to 9 out of 10 cases of early detection.…
