Tom Harkin: “So I will support the Byrd amendment because he is not trying to take money from one pot and move it to another; he is…”

“So I will support the Byrd amendment because he is not trying to take money from one pot and move it to another; he is saying the budget was wrong. We ought to waive it and put the money in. Now, with all due respect, again, to my friend from Pennsylvania, in going back over the history of this, I wish to point out that the Byrd amendment only closes 50 percent of the gap between the authorization level and what is in the Senate bill. I have here a chart that shows the authorization and the appropriations levels going back to fiscal year 2002. Senator Specter made mention there was an interim period there when our party was in charge for about a year, so we were in charge of the budget and the appropriations at that time. I point out that at that point our appropriations were a little over 70 percent, maybe about 75 percent of the authorization level. Today, we are less than 40 percent of the authorization level. So what Senator Byrd has said is the authorization level is going up, our appropriations are staying flat. We now have this huge gap. We are trying to close this gap. It is not 100 percent. It is about 50 percent of closing that gap, and that would tend to bring us back to about where we were 3 or 4 years ago, in terms of the difference between the authorization level and the appropriations level. Now, there is one other thing that happened during this period of time.…”