Jerry Nadler: “the project that this amendment seeks to remove from this bill is an extremely important project. The American Museum of…”

“the project that this amendment seeks to remove from this bill is an extremely important project. The American Museum of Natural History is raising a total of private funding and local public funding for $135 million investment in a national center for science literacy. What they are going to do is to rebuild the Hayden planetarium and create a brand-new planetarium with the most up-to-date resources, and not only is this going to be the best planetarium probably in the world, and that is all being done with local funds, but the national center for science literacy, which lists $13 million for that fund, will make the resources, the scientific and educational resources of the museum, available to every classroom in the country, to every library in the country, to anyone who could hook into the Internet, to anyone with a computer and access. So this $13 million is not a local pork project for New York, it is to take a major investment being made by the New York City government and the New York State government and private philanthropy in New York, and this $13 million will make the fruits of this investment available to everyone in the country. Not a dime of the Federal appropriation would go toward construction of anything in New York.”