David Obey: “this amendment, like so many others offered today, demonstrates that the White House is incredibly off base when they…”

“this amendment, like so many others offered today, demonstrates that the White House is incredibly off base when they tell us that this bill is over-funded. This bill is about 2.5 percent in real terms above last year. The fact that it is so tight and still falls so short of meeting many needs is evidenced by the fact that we have this kind of amendment before us. The only difference between this amendment and several others is that the others have been coming from the minority side of the aisle and this one happens to come from the majority side of the aisle. But let me simply say that I fully appreciate where the gentleman wants to put the money. It is a good place to put it. There are many other good places to put it. The problem is that it is simply not real to believe that you can decimate the administrative budget of the Department of Education as much as this amendment does. I am not going to ask people to vote one way or another on this, because no matter which way you vote, you will be wrong, because this amendment, because of the squeeze that we are in, because of the tremendous demand for education help in this country, no matter what you do, someone will be shortchanged. It is either the department that is supposed to administer the programs or the programs themselves. So I sympathize with what the gentleman is trying to do.”