The Public Record
When it comes to homeland security, the rhetoric flies fast and furious. Everyone wants a safer, better-prepared America against both terror threats and natural events like Hurricane Isabel. But our actions do not always match rhetoric. In…
No. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I was not an advocate of the position in the conference committee. I thought we made a mistake in changing it. To be fair, the language in the bill retains some money as a separate line item, and there…
But as I read this, none of the funds made available in this act may be used to provide assistance to any State or local government or official that restricts any government entity or official from sending or receiving funds, and I am not…
Reclaiming my time, as I read this amendment, this says, none of the funds can be used to provide assistance to any State or local government, entity, or official that does certain things. I do not quite understand the end of this, what…
But, Mr. Chairman, what I am trying to get at, I guess, is my understanding that you are saying that the old law applied to the INS; this law now applies to the Department of Homeland Security, which is 22 agencies rather than one agency.
Reclaiming my time, and this is money that local responders can use for buying new equipment in a coordinated fashion, in a State plan or for training to have them become equipped to meet the threats that may occur in this country?
And this amendment, as I understand it, would take some of this little money that we distribute throughout the country and say we are going to cut that from everyone. Where they are working, trying to coordinate expenditures to make most…
But we find that when we raise threat levels in this country, the law enforcement and local responders are expected to respond throughout the country and they have the same problem over time, training, teaching people how to use new…
No. We do have a river one but fairly small. So I think it would be fair to say we made a special effort to try to allocate more money to ports, that that will go to a limited part of the country.
Reclaiming my time, for those of us who come from the heartland of the country, we are having discussion over how much money should go to ports. We have allocated a significant amount, and others would like to allocate more. My assumption…
Which criteria that many of us have trouble understanding yet. The balance of the money flows by formula to the States, including the States that are eligible for this additional $500 million?
Five hundred million. And this goes to a limited number of communities in the country?
Did I just hear correctly a little while ago that the Secretary's request of our committee for the high-threat urban grant was zero?
We have a little trouble getting a precise understanding of what criteria are used.
And so this bill goes contrary to what we have done in our first couple of CRs and actually writes into the CR that we are reducing funding for highways next year.
This is confusing. I know that there is disagreement between House and Senate bills, but from all the interpretations of what we have been doing, I think it is clear that no one can dispute that if we want to spend money that has impact on…
What is this language in the bill today? I read it, and it seems to me we are writing into law something about 31.8, that appears to be a smoke screen to make people feel good, then there is an exception for it which indicates and takes us…
In our previous continuing resolutions we were told we had an obligation limit of $31.8 billion.
All the funds that I speak of and all the funds that the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) speaks of in his amendment, as I understand, are declared to be emergency funds, so they could only be spent, even after they are appropriated, if…
I thank my colleagues for including in the bill a $4 million increase for transmission reliability and to direct the Department of Energy to initiate field-testing of advanced composite conductors. I just want to clarify that these…
As I was saying, I have here a letter from the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which is an association of State, provincial, and Federal officials responsible for the administration and enforcement of motor carrier safety laws. They…
The committee has also increased funding for the Federal Aviation Administration's environment and energy budget to research aircraft noise mitigation to $27.6 million, an increase of $24.1 million over fiscal year 2001, in order to speed…
I remain concerned by the disparity between Federal funds spent on highway transportation and the figure spent on mass transit.
I agree that we need to aggressively pursue new technologies that will make our transportation infrastructure safer, more economical and friendlier towards the environment. I assure the gentleman that as the ranking minority member of the…
So, it is probably close to 60 percent of the operations actually comes from general revenue and not from the trust fund.
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