Political Quotes

“What my amendment does is it eliminates funding to the tune of $470 million for ARPA-E, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy; $470 million. What this Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy is designed to fund are high-risk, high-reward projects in which the private sector would never invest in. Since it is taxpayers' money, what this proposed amendment does is to cut funding because it doesn't do the job that the dollars that they expended it to. The problem is that ARPA-E does not always seem to follow its own guidelines. The Federal Government has awarded several ARPA-E grants to companies and projects that are neither high risk nor something that private industry cannot support. In other words, they don't need the crutch. These problems with ARPA-E were identified by the GAO, the Department of Energy Office of Inspector General, and the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Of the 44 small- and medium-sized companies that received an ARPA award, the GAO found that 18 had previously received private-sector investments for similar technology. It is a duplicate. The GAO found that 12 of those 18 companies plan to use ARPA-E funding to either advance or accelerate prior funded projects. I am in the real estate business. That is like paying me double to build you a house or a shopping center. How much sense does that make? It doesn't. Mr. Chair, in your world, it pays double to do one surgery. How does that work out? It is taxpayers' money.…”