House Committee on Education and Labor
U.S. House of Representatives

Thank you Madam Chair, I stand in opposition to H.R. 3021 and I yield myself such time as I may consume. 

The name of this bill is a mouthful, but it seems harmless enough.  The 21^st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act.  Sounds like a program to ensure good schools, safe schools, environmentally-friendly schools – it sounds pretty good to me. 

It’s when we look a little closer that the real goal becomes clear.  This is a bill that puts us on the path toward federalizing the building and maintenance of our nation’s schools.  It’s about feeding bigger government and giving Washington more control over what happens in states and local communities. 

We’re talking about an estimated $20 billion over the next five years, handed out to states and schools so that we can exercise control over how they build their schools.  Maybe a school has a leaky roof.  The federal government is happy to pay to get it fixed.  But instead of spending a thousand dollars on a repair, we tell the school it has to spend a hundred-thousand dollars on a new roof that meets our hand-picked environmental standards. 

And Big Brother doesn’t stop there.  We also link this funding to the Depression-era Davis-Bacon Act, meaning that construction projects under this bill must pay so-called prevailing wages.  The problem is, prevailing wage calculations are critically and fundamentally flawed.  Sometimes they’re higher than market rates, and other times they’re lower.  Take plumbers, for instance.  In a sampling of cities, plumbers paid Davis-Bacon wages could be paid anywhere from 70 percent below the market rate to 77 percent above the market rate. 

Davis-Bacon requirements drive up the cost of federal projects by 10, 15, 20 percent, and sometimes more.  These are costs that get passed on to the taxpayers.  Moreover, these requirements force private companies to do hundreds of millions of dollars of excess administrative work each year. 

So already, we’re talking about a new, $20 billion program to fund an inefficient construction mandate that allows bureaucrats here in Washington to tell our neighborhoods and small towns and big cities exactly how their school buildings should be built, from the materials they use to the contractors they hire.

Madam Chair, I’d like to know where that $20 billion is going to come from. 

When we were in the majority, we heard no end to the complaints from the other side of the aisle that we were underfunding No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.  I’m proud of our record of strong support for those programs, but it’s true that they’re not funded at their authorized level.  It was true when Democrats were in the majority up until 1995.  It was true when we were in the majority.  And it’s still true today, with Democrats back at the helm.  The reality is that neither party has funded these programs at their authorized maximum. 

If we have $20 billion to spend on our schools, shouldn’t we invest that in keeping the promises we’ve already made?  We’re looking at $6.4 billion authorized for this program next year alone.  Do you know what that could do for Title I, or IDEA?  We could increase special education funding by almost 60 percent in one year.  We could bring Title I funding to more than $20 billion. 

I don’t know whether we have the money to spend on this program.  In fact, I think we probably don’t.  But if we have it, we have a duty to spend it on programs that help improve academic achievement for disadvantaged children. 

I also think it’s ironic that we’re here today proposing a program to build more schools when districts around the country are struggling just to pay for the fuel it takes to transport children and operate, heat, and cool the schools we already have.  Like the rest of the country, our schools are being squeezed by the high price of gasoline. 

Rising fuel prices are taking a real toll on our nation’s schools.  Beyond diesel fuel and heating oil, schools are faced with higher supply costs, fewer field trips, and costlier school lunches.  First it was community colleges forced to move to a four-day school week.  Now, even K-12 school systems are reducing the number of school days because of the pain at the pump.  Unfortunately, that’s a problem for which the Democrats are offering no answers. 

Madam Chair, this is a bad program based on a flawed premise.  Yes, there’s a need for school construction and modernization.  It’s a need that is best handled at the state and local level, where they can be responsive to each community’s unique needs.  The federal role in education has been limited to targeted interventions that help provide a more level playing field for children who might otherwise be left behind.  That’s where our focus should remain.  I reserve the balance of my time.