Alan Simpson: “I claim time reluctantly. I happen to be one who thinks the ARPA-E does some good work. My biggest problem is that, as I…”

“I claim time reluctantly. I happen to be one who thinks the ARPA-E does some good work. My biggest problem is that, as I said last night on either the first or second amendment that was offered to this bill, they took money out of departmental administration to fund something, and then another one to take money out of departmental administration. So far we have taken out about $50 million out of a $245 million budget for the departmental administration. It is easy to vote that way because who wants to pay for the administrative costs? Yet we are going to have to deal with that when we get into conference to make sure that they have adequate funding in the Department for the administrative work. {time} 1600 So at some point in time, I have to say I can't support continuing to take money out of the departmental administration in order to fund a variety of programs, even though some of them may be very worthwhile. And while I, myself, am not opposed to ARPA-E and think they do some good work, the reality is, you have to balance this bill. We have got ARPA-E down $266 million from what it was last year and substantially below what the President requested, but we had other priorities that we had to fund. And the other thing I had to consider is that the Science and Technology Committee--that is, the authorizing committee that does much of this work--has marked up a bill in their committee that substantially reduces the overall funding authorization for ARPA-E.…”