Rob Woodall: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My amendment moves to strike from the operation and maintenance account all dollars for global…”

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My amendment moves to strike from the operation and maintenance account all dollars for global warming project planning. I know the committee put a lot of effort into this particular section of the bill, plussing it up almost a million dollars over 2011 levels, up $52 million from the FY 2012 request. I come from a county--my primary county, Mr. Chairman, depends entirely on a Corps water project for all of our drinking water, not to mention recreation and economic development, and on and on and on. So I'm very interesting in seeing the Corps succeed. What I'm concerned about are those silos that are being created in government today, Mr. Chairman. This body in the early 1970s would have been talking about the calamity we are faced with, global cooling, and here we today with a special budget line item for global warming for the Corps of Engineers. We have a great deal of global warming money going into our Department of the Interior, going into the Environmental Protection Agency. The Corps at its core is a construction agency, and certainly this account provides for operations and maintenance for anything that might come up along those lines. But rather than creating this silo to focus specifically on global warming issues, in these tough economic times when we have so many Corps projects that are so lacking in funding, my amendment would strike this account in its entirety, $4.9 million, and transfer that money to a deficit reduction account.…”