Judd Gregg: “I appreciate the proposal of the Senator from West Virginia. It is sincere and well intentioned. Obviously, if we had…”

“I appreciate the proposal of the Senator from West Virginia. It is sincere and well intentioned. Obviously, if we had the extra money, I would do it. Unfortunately, we are working within budget restraints, and the decision was made within this bill to move dollars from accounts that we felt had either robust funding or a fair amount of money still in the pipeline toward accounts where we knew we had great needs such as weapons of mass destruction and border security. I simply note that in the area of firefighter assistance, since 2003 we have put $2.5 billion into this initiative. In an earlier amendment, we moved money from the equipment funds over to the staffing funds so that we now have $115 million in this budget for staffing initiatives, which I think is very important because of that $2.5 billion, a very small percentage has been spent on staffing. As the Senator from West Virginia noted, we need to get people up to speed as to training and staffing capabilities. We retain still $500 million for equipment in this bill, which is a fair number of dollars. We have approximately $715 million in the pipeline which has not gone out yet from 2005. Hopefully it will go out quickly and soon, but it has not gone out yet. So we know there is a fair amount of money in the pipeline.…”