Haley Stevens: “now to the military construction bill. The President has asked us on repeated occasions to bring matters before the…”

“now to the military construction bill. The President has asked us on repeated occasions to bring matters before the Senate and the Congress as a whole to deal with those disasters caused by the hurricanes. Those hurricanes came so fast, as we got one request, we got another request, we got another request, so we decided to put them all together and move them all. I credit the wisdom of the distinguished chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Chairman Bill Young, for the ingenuity in doing that because we might have been facing separate bills on all of those supplemental requests had we not put them all together. We requested the Military Construction Subcommittee in conference to allow us to add that coalition, that combination of those hurricane supplementals, to put them on that bill. That military construction bill passed both Houses. And obviously that is the quickest way to get the money to Florida and those other States. That money, some $9.1 billion in particular for the hurricane areas, is of extreme importance. I point out that in that bill is directed scoring that shows the provision we put in this bill to obtain the budget authority that we did not have available to our committees--we borrowed in effect from a program that has budget authorities extending out until 2012--we have a provision in this bill that says that program cannot be impacted by this offset from now until the year 2007.”