John W. Olver: “at the outset here I want to say that this is a worthy program. However, the President's request this year for budgeting…”

“at the outset here I want to say that this is a worthy program. However, the President's request this year for budgeting under the jurisdiction of this subcommittee was at least $3 billion below the enacted levels for the same functions in the previous year's bill, in the 2006 bill. During every stage of this process, I have pointed out that we had that set of holes, serious holes in the budget that had to be filled, that we needed to try to fill. There is a further problem that under the authorizing legislation there are guarantees for funding for transportation items in highways, in FTA, in FAA, which the President's request was also below. We had to meet those guarantees in order to be able to bring the bill to the floor for debate at all. Otherwise, the point of order would lay against the whole TTHUD bill that we are debating today. So here we have an amendment which proposes to put money in an item in transportation where there are already heavy guarantees that we have to meet and proposes to take money from another section of the bill, one section of the bill which is about one-sixth as large in total as the transportation portion, and takes money from that where there are no guarantees whatsoever. This is something which I must oppose.…”