Don Nickles: “before I describe the amendment, first I would like to just express my appreciation to my colleagues, Senator Bond from…”

“before I describe the amendment, first I would like to just express my appreciation to my colleagues, Senator Bond from Missouri and Senator Mikulski from Maryland. I have the pleasure of serving with them on the Appropriations Committee, on this subcommittee, and I enjoyed the work on this subcommittee. This subcommittee is a hard committee because it deals with so many agencies. It is not easy. It is not just one agency. The bill is commonly VA-HUD and other agencies. It includes EPA, the Science Foundation, NASA and so on. So it requires an enormous amount of work by staff and by Senators to try to stay on top of all the demands, and the multitude of requests by the agencies and Senators who are involved with them. So I compliment them for their work. Mr. President, I agree with most of the things they have in their bill, although I have some questions about the cost of the bill, but I will may raise that at another time. I notice in the committee report the bill has about a $5 billion increase in requests compared to last year. I do not know of any other appropriations bill that has that kind of increase. I am going to have to check into that, but that is not what I raise tonight. I may vote against the bill because of the $5 billion compared to last year's level. I am concerned about that, but I am going to do my homework on that.”