On the recordApril 29, 2015
I want to thank the gentleman from Michigan and the gentlelady from California for working with us on this. What a lot of people may not understand is the challenge that presents us with the harbor maintenance trust fund and the way it is scored and the way it is counted for. I am one who believes that, if you have got a problem and you are going to tax people in order to address that problem, you ought to spend the money that you are receiving to address the problem. Instead, what happens is we spend--as I think the gentleman said, 69 percent is the target--we will only spend 69 percent of what came in this year in the harbor maintenance trust fund on actually dredging the harbors and so forth. That seems rather silly. I think we ought to be able to spend it all if we have got a problem. If we are not going to spend it all, we shouldn't tax it. The problem is the way we score things and the budget around here is that we are given an overall cap in the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies of the Committee on Appropriations. We have to have our total bill come in under that cap. If we spend more money in the harbor maintenance area, even though we have that money in a trust fund, then we have to decrease spending in everything else, such as the other energy portions of the bill or something like that, so increasing it even more decreases what we can spend in other needed areas. That is the challenge we face.…
