On the recordJune 8, 2012
Everything the gentleman said is true except for the fact that what we are doing in this bill is actually shutting down the Open World program. When you do that, there are some costs involved in the final shutdown, and that's why last year this was funded at $10 million. To shut down the program, we basically took away $9 million, left $1 million there to terminate the existing contracts that we have. There's some final compensation that has to be paid. They have to close some offices. There are potential unemployment claims. And so the point of this bill is to do exactly as the gentleman suggests, and that is to shut down this program which probably at one time was a very worthwhile program and was, I guess, a program that you could afford. But in today's world, this is a program that, under this legislative subcommittee, doesn't seem to be the right place to find funding. There were attempts in the past to fund it under the State- Foreign Operations Subcommittee. But bottom line, the goal of this committee is to shut down this program because we can't afford it anymore. Even if you pass this amendment, it still costs a million dollars to shut down the program. The Congressional Budget Office scores it as a million dollars. So I would say we ought not to pass this amendment. We ought to continue the process that has been started to shut down this program, and these dollars will be used to do just that. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.
