Don Nickles: “Do we have the request in writing? The staff informs me that we do. I have not seen that. I would appreciate a copy of…”

“Do we have the request in writing? The staff informs me that we do. I have not seen that. I would appreciate a copy of that. It is a heck of a deal. Here we are on Wednesday, and this request came in on Tuesday to give us another $1.8 billion or $1.9 billion, and we are just going to do it. For the life of me, if this is that much of an emergency, you would think James Lee Witt would have been working on every Member of the Congress saying, ``We have to have this money.'' He has not. What I was hearing up until a week or so ago is that they had enough. Now, all of a sudden, they need $1.6 billion or $260 million on Community Development Block Grant money, and we do not even know how they spent $500 million last year. They cannot even account for that $500 million of the emergency money last year. Yet, we are getting ready to give another $260 million plus $1.6 billion for FEMA. I think that is a mistake. I am told that there are no community block development requests from the administration--none. There may be a verbal request, but no written request. I am assuming that is what my staff is telling me. They did not make the request, but we gave them the money anyway. I know some of my colleagues would like to have that money.”