Tom Coburn: “I just thought I would give us a rundown of where the $700,000 came from last year so we can all know where it came from…”

“I just thought I would give us a rundown of where the $700,000 came from last year so we can all know where it came from since none of this was authorized and it came from several different agencies. The Air Force gave $50,000. That is really defense of our country. The Bureau of Land Management gave $20,000; the EPA gave $18,000; the Forest Service gave $75,000; the National Biologic Service gave $30,000; the National Park Service, $60,000; NASA, $50,000; NOAA, $50,000; the National Science Foundation, $50,000; the Peace Corps gave $11,000 of their budget to the Project Man and Biosphere. The State Department gave $240,000 of their money to the biosphere program last year. The State Department; I am having trouble connecting what that has to do with the State Department in terms of protecting that. USAID, which is not quite biosphere, it gave $60,000. We spent $7,000 in Denmark out of this money, we spent $11,000 on the European market, we spent $11,000 in the Mexican biosphere project, and we spent $23,000 in the Russian biodiversity information project. So I guess the question comes is if this is a legitimate project, let us bring it through the Congress, let us bring it through the Committee on Science, let us authorize it and then put the money there.”