Tom Price: “as you know, this bill, the Water Quality Investment Act of 2007, would reauthorize an expired Federal program that…”

“as you know, this bill, the Water Quality Investment Act of 2007, would reauthorize an expired Federal program that provides grants to States for the purpose of providing money to a municipality or municipalities for planning, designing and construction of treatment works for combined sewer overflows and sanitary sewer overflows. This bill authorizes, at least did prior to the last amendment, $1.8 billion in Federal grants. And while this bill is important, equally important is that my amendment will apply the principle of pay-as-you-go, something that we have heard a lot talked about here by the new majority. Any new spending authorized in this bill would be required to be offset by a specific amount to make it so that there would be no increase in Federal spending. Simply, the amendment provides that no authorization of appropriations made by this act that results in costs to the Federal Government shall be effective, except to the extent that the act provides for equal decreases in spending somewhere else in the Federal Government. An excerpt from the ``New Direction for America,'' which was proposed by the now majority party last year when they were running for the majority, said, ``Our new direction is committed to pay-as-you-go budgeting. No more deficit spending.…”