I want to thank the gentleman from Alabama and the gentleman from New Jersey for their help. The coast of Louisiana has experienced extraordinary challenges over the last several decades--everything from the management of the Mississippi River system through levees, the BP oil spill, and now, an invasive end sector scale on some of the vegetation in coastal Louisiana. When you add up the cumulative impact of all of these things, our State has lost about 2,000 square miles of our coast. That is 2,000 square miles that the Gulf of Mexico has encroached upon; that is 2,000 square miles where our communities are much more vulnerable now to hurricanes. And we are certainly all sensitive to that with Hurricane Harvey just hitting our State and Texas, and Hurricane Irma currently headed toward the mainland of the United States. An amendment that was agreed to as part of this en bloc package simply transfers $400,000 from an administrative account to research through APHIS, to study this invasive scale. And this may sound like some small issue that doesn't matter, but it is causing significant impact, to the tune of square miles of additional coastal loss in Louisiana that is going to make our communities that much more vulnerable and cause significant environmental impact.…
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