Marcy Kaptur: “This bill obviously has been put together under some of the most trying budget circumstances that we have ever seen.…”

“This bill obviously has been put together under some of the most trying budget circumstances that we have ever seen. When last year's bill came before us, I said we were trying to stuff a size 10 foot into a shoe that was actually size 7. This year we have a size 6 shoe, and we have a size 11 foot. And so we have many more needs than we can accommodate in this bill. We literally had requests from Members from across our country, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of requests that we could simply not address. They are not addressed in this bill at all. The discretionary portion of this bill totals $16.772 billion, which is a reduction of $67 million over this year, and compared to fiscal year 2003, a reduction of over $1.1 billion.”