Political Quotes

“I will be brief and just sort of walk through this amendment. This is a good government amendment that I hope that everybody can get behind. The House omnibus includes a provision allowing the NTIA to capture 337 million in IIJA funding to expand its bureaucracy. So just to sort of walk through this, under the Infrastructure Act, there was $42 billion for administrative costs. That is $850 million. That money, as it relates to the BEAD Program, because it is pretty diffused across the country, they don't have a lot of those administrative costs. So now they are coming back in under the BEAD Program and saying we need $337 million for administrative costs. But they have only justified $226 million. So this would save taxpayers $110 million. If they want to justify it down the road for something specific, they can go ahead and do that. But this is to sort of deal with that. If you want another reason to support this: There is also some new initiative related to Algorithmic Justice--whatever that is--and we would make sure that no dollars go to Algorithmic Justice. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.”