Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman for yielding. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to this amendment, which would eliminate funding for the Department of Energy's EPSCoR program. For more than 40 years, the Department of Energy has provided academic research funding to colleges and universities around the Nation, and it has been critical to ongoing research that is essential to maintaining our competitive edge in energy advancement. The DOE's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, commonly known as EPSCoR, is a science-driven, merit-based program, whose mission is to help balance the allocation of DOE and other Federal research and development funding to avoid an undue concentration of money to only a few States. This successful program has had a profound impact on my home State of Rhode Island by allowing our academic institutions to increase research capacity, to enrich the experiences of their students, and to contribute to important advances in a variety of fields. Currently, 24 States, including Rhode Island, and three jurisdictions account for only about 6 percent of all DOE funding despite the fact that these States account for 20 percent of the U.S. population. EPSCoR has helped to stabilize this imbalance in funding, and it should continue to do so in the 2017 fiscal year and beyond.…”