David Obey: “Mr. Chairman, I wanted to first of all congratulate the chairman of the committee, the gentleman from Florida (Mr.…”

“Mr. Chairman, I wanted to first of all congratulate the chairman of the committee, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), for doing his usual good job in trying to produce a bipartisan bill. As members of the committee know, our committee worked for 6 weeks and produced a bipartisan bill. And I want to tell you some of the things that it did to correct some of the chaos that we see in some of the agencies that are dealing with counterterrorism. We found out that the Department of Energy had asked for $380 million to upgrade security so that weapons of mass destruction and nuclear material would be less susceptible either to terrorist attack or theft. OMB only approved 7 percent of that money. The committee provided the amount that was needed. We also discovered that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had asked for $52 million because they had the reasonable idea that we ought to be able to determine which immigrants, or which persons here on visas I should say, had overstayed their visas; visas had expired; they had been asked to leave the country and, yet, had refused to do so. The INS wanted $52 million to set up a system to stop that nonsense. The OMB denied it all. The committee put in enough money to deal with the problem.”