David Obey: “I believe the House is familiar with this amendment. I have offered similar amendments a number of times. It does go…”

“I believe the House is familiar with this amendment. I have offered similar amendments a number of times. It does go straight to the question of our national priorities. Let me take a little broader view than just this year. If we look at some of the reductions in this bill, and just look at the 1-year reductions, such as we have here in EDA or such as we have in law enforcement, the 1-year reductions do not look too bad, but if we take a look at what happened to these programs since fiscal year 2001, we see that we still have a deep reduction in some of these activities. For example, the State and local law enforcement grants have been cut by $1 billion over that time. There is no way that we cannot have an effect on local law enforcement by having cuts of that magnitude over that period of time. The same is true with EDA. There are many urban districts who do not care much about EDA, but my district, I do not have a city over 37,000. Small cities like that cannot hire a bunch of fancy grant writers. They need all of the help they can get to compete for Federal money for job creation, and the Economic Development Administration, EDA, tries to provide that.…”