Steve Scalise: “This is a bipartisan amendment, worked on with Mr. Richmond and others, and it deals with dredging. You know, we've seen…”

“This is a bipartisan amendment, worked on with Mr. Richmond and others, and it deals with dredging. You know, we've seen over the last few months a shift in the Corps of Engineers' policy. In years past, they've always reprogrammed millions of dollars, in many cases tens of millions of dollars, from other areas within their agency because they inadequately had initially funded dredging of our waterways. And of course, this is the lifeblood to moving commerce throughout not only much of our country, but as we export to other countries throughout the world. For whatever reason, the Corps made an internal decision earlier this year that they would no longer do that reprogramming, which jeopardizes much of the movements that we have along our waterways. This amendment is revenue-neutral. It doesn't add anything to the cost of the bill. But what it does is it takes money out of the general administration account, which actually saw an increase this year, moves it over into the general operations and maintenance section of the bill so that it allows us at least additional revenues to go and properly dredge our waterways. Why is this important? Number one, it's a critical jobs issue. Because as we just saw a few weeks ago, prior to some of the record levels of flooding, Mr. Chairman, we saw they had to roll back, just in my region of the New Orleans area, they had to roll back some of the depth that they were allowed to transport on the Mississippi River.…”