Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I am going to sound like a broken record here, so I will keep it short. I am not picking winners and losers or favorites here. First, the Great Lakes Authority has only been authorized since 2022. It is 2024 now. It still does not have a Federal co-chair. It has no website. It has no programs funded. There is nobody there. Yet, strangely, it is still receiving Federal dollars, to the tune of $5 million, for projects supposedly in the watershed regions of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. I don't know because there is no one to ask. Mr. Chair, we have seen how other commissions have gone. President Trump urged the elimination of three of them, and President Obama recommended cuts and elimination for the Denali Commission, making it bipartisan. With that level of bipartisan criticism of existing commissions, I don't see why we need to dig ourselves even deeper with yet another commission. My goodness, Pennsylvania is covered by two of them. That is my home State. You have to call the balls and strikes. I know people in this building will scoff at the difference between $2.5 million and $5 million. We are saying $2.5 million, which is pretty bad for me. I am saying to spend $2.5 million on a commission that doesn't have a co-chair, has no website, and has no programs funded, not $5 million.…”