Gus Bilirakis: “First, we are not losing money today here, as people on the other side are saying. It is unfortunate, we have all worked…”

“First, we are not losing money today here, as people on the other side are saying. It is unfortunate, we have all worked so well together on this piece of legislation, and all of a sudden we are throwing stones at each other. It is just a terrible thing to see. We are not losing money today, because the States could not possibly have been prepared to use the money effective yesterday, which is when this thing was supposed to go into effect. We are not talking about the States sitting there basically just waiting for this money to start putting it into effect right off the bat. It is impossible. What we are doing today, of course, is granting the legal authority to spend the $7.6 billion on safe drinking water. Actually providing this money, as we all know, but nobody seems to be saying it, is the job of the Committee on Appropriations, as it always is. Can we guess what the Committee on Appropriations is going to do in forthcoming years? I think not. Second, my colleagues complained rather loudly about so-called pork. They do not talk about the 99.75 percent of the bill that they agree with. Let the record show that the funding under attack here represents less than one-quarter of 1 percent of all funds authorized.”