Steven Holt: “On that point, the gentleman talks about the needs for school construction. It is clearly a national need to find and…”

“On that point, the gentleman talks about the needs for school construction. It is clearly a national need to find and recruit and train teachers and give them good, continual professional development, and there is IDEA and special education. In his campaign, President Bush promised to increase the resources for special education, moving toward, as he said, full funding of the average per-pupil expenditures. Let me hasten to say, as I said earlier, I believe that there is money available to give people of this country a significant tax cut. I want to do that, but we want to get the horse before the cart, get our obligations out in front of us, talk about the debt, and then make our decisions. But to make room for this huge tax cut, President Bush's budget would provide $44.5 billion for the U.S. Department of Education, a 2.4 percent increase, which is only 6 percent, which does not keep pace with the increase in the Department of Education over the past 5 years. In fact, compared with last year, which was 18 percent, it is a very small increase. As our colleague, the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley) pointed out, that increase is not enough to deal with special education only; even that, not counting school construction, not counting after school and summer school programs, not counting teacher recruitment. There is, in the sketchy numbers we have about the budget from the President, for the Department of Education, it looks like it does not add up. Something has to give.”