Scott Walker: “It seems to me, though, that we do not want to do the Brown substitute. As the gentleman from California himself has…”

“It seems to me, though, that we do not want to do the Brown substitute. As the gentleman from California himself has said, this is not offset. It will increase the National Weather Service local warning and forecast budget by $26 million. That means that we are not dealing in the same manner that the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Wamp] has done, in the responsible way of assuring that we do this with an offset. Unlike the Wamp amendment, which adds money for both modernization and local warnings and forecasts, the Brown amendment eliminates all the reductions that the Committee on Science made to the National Weather Service headquarters and specialized weather programs, and does not include any money for the modernization program. That strikes me as being an odd set of priorities. What you are doing is plusing up the account for the headquarters staff and overhead while not putting the money into the modernization program that the Weather Service regards as its most important priority. So the Wamp amendment in fact moves us toward a much stronger content level on it.”