Bob Wise: “Speaking of education, Mr. Chairman, I find it interesting to talk about this great Federal monolith, since 94 cents of…”

“Speaking of education, Mr. Chairman, I find it interesting to talk about this great Federal monolith, since 94 cents of every dollar in public education is at the State and local level. Let us talk about the Department of Commerce. If you were a business person, Mr. Speaker, and I came and said to you that I have a great idea, and you asked what is that, and I said we have this agency, the Department of Commerce, that because it developed for the first time ever a national export strategy, and because it has had an aggressive Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown, and now Mickey Kantor; has generated 80 billion dollars' worth of contracts over the last 3 years; and because this department was so effective that it took $1.5 billion, half of it private money, and generated 220 public-private partnerships to promote civilian technology, and because we have this Department of Commerce that has increased exports 26 percent over the past 3 years, and because we have this Department of Commerce that has increased tourism and provided the first White House conference ever on this growing industry for much of America, and you might be saying, yes, yes, what are you going to do with this agency, their answer would be, we are going to eliminate it? Because that is what this budget does.”