Steny Hoyer: “Mr. Chairman, before launching into a statement on the Treasury-Postal appropriations, I want to pay tribute to my…”

“Mr. Chairman, before launching into a statement on the Treasury-Postal appropriations, I want to pay tribute to my friend and colleague, the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Lightfoot], the chairman of the subcommittee. As all of us know, he is running for the Senate and will not be with us next year in the House. I would like to thank him and the staff for the diligent work that they have done on this bill. I also want to reiterate what I said in committee. I want to thank the chairman and the committee for the openness with which they have dealt with us on the legislation before us, particularly as it relates to preceding the initial subcommittee markup. I appreciate it and it was helpful. Mr. Chairman, the Treasury-Postal bill has been a hard bill to put together for fiscal year 1997, based in part on the deck we have been dealt by the budget resolution and the committee's 602(b) allocation, or more plainly, the money that we were given by the full Committee on Appropriations to carry out our responsibilities. For fiscal year 1997, the 602(b) allocation requires an overall reduction of $130 million in budget authority and a half a billion dollars in outlays from the 1996 appropriation level, a half a billion dollars below what was a very tight budget in 1996. We simply do not have enough money to fund all the requirements of this bill. Once again, there is another illustration of why we should have adopted the coalition budget.”