Mike Conaway: “the amendment I have is pretty simple. It would strike section 3010 in its entirety. 3010 deals with the acceleration of…”

“the amendment I have is pretty simple. It would strike section 3010 in its entirety. 3010 deals with the acceleration of the payments on LIHEAP from fiscal year 2007 into fiscal year 2006 by some $750 million. The basis of this being in there has not been laid. This is not an emergency, certainly. We have had one of the mildest winters that we have had in a long, long time. I have also got it on relatively good authority, scientific authority, that we will have a winter in 2007, that this money was originally set up to supplement LIHEAP funding in that year. This funding came about as a result of some very difficult work that was done on the Deficit Reduction Act, and offsets were put in place to allow for this spending in 2007. All of the hard work that went into it, all of the groundwork that was laid to convince us that this was needed for 2007 would be inaccurate, I guess, if we were, in fact, to pass this amendment, because that Deficit Reduction Act was passed in early February. So it has been a little more than a month since the work was done that this House collectively said this $750 million should be spent in 2007 for the LIHEAP program.…”