John Tierney: “I thank the gentleman for yielding. We could have had a bipartisan bill, and that seems to be the real shame here. This…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. We could have had a bipartisan bill, and that seems to be the real shame here. This has been historically a bill that has not been hyperpartisan as the one that's before us today, the one by which the parties have generally sat down together and considered each other's opinions in order to come to the best solution, but it didn't happen. The underlying bill arbitrarily eliminates and consolidates all the programs and collapses them into one. It tries to substitute that, I guess, for an analysis of what ought to be done. It relies on the comments of a GAO report that said some of the programs may have overlapped somewhat, but it did not reach the conclusion that they were duplicative or that they didn't serve necessary and unique populations. Instead, the majority has seized on that to collapse all of the programs together and to freeze the funding instead of doing what our bill would do, which is to provide for data and analysis in consideration of what programs ought to be sustained; to make them justify how they're improving and serving the populations; and to determine whether or not there need to be changes or whether some do, in fact, need to be terminated or consolidated. That process has been avoided and ignored throughout.…”