Marshall Sanford: “this amendment would simply hold at the fiscal 2000 year level special research grants. The reason I think that this is…”

“this amendment would simply hold at the fiscal 2000 year level special research grants. The reason I think that this is important is because there has been basically a $14 million increase in overall research grants, which represents a 24 percent increase in this category of spending within this bill, and that is significant, because that is about eight times the rate of growth in inflation. It is about eight times the rate of growth in overall government expenditure. Mr. Chairman, one of the reasons that this occurred was that there are $15 million in new research grants over the last year. They were not part of the fiscal year 2000 budget. They were not requested by the President. They were not appropriated by the Senate. In short, they were simply pork for Members within the agricultural committee. I do not blame them one bit for doing this. They were watching out for their district, but if my colleagues look at the last component of cooperative State research education extension grants, they are to be focused on a national mission. This just flat out is not the case as we look down to these grants.”