Amendment to Defund the Economic Development Administration
House Floor, Washington, D.C.
May 8, 2012

Mme. Chairman:

    I rise in strong support of the amendment by the gentleman from Kansas.

    The new Republican House majority was elected with the specific charge to bring spending under control.  We can’t blame the Senate or the President any more if there’s waste in the budget. Money doesn’t get spent by this government unless the House says it gets spent.  In a very real Constitutional sense, the buck starts here.

    Here is an appropriations bill originating in this House that still has outrageously wasteful and indefensible spending.  Perhaps the flagship of this folly is the $182 million in unauthorized – there’s that word again: unauthorized – spending for the Economic Development Administration.

    This is solely and simply a slush fund that gives away money for the most dubious of local projects.

    Local projects that benefit local communities should be funded locally.  We shouldn’t be robbing St. Petersburg to pay St. Paul.  We must ask ourselves, if these projects are so important to local communities, why are those local communities unwilling to pay for them?  And if the communities that directly benefit from these projects are unwilling to pay for them, why are we spending federal money that we don’t have?

    To add insult to insanity, this agency is already sitting on $845 million.  Why on Earth would we provide it with another $180 million?   We ought to abolish this agency and recover the unspent funds, not throw good money after bad.

    Tim Carney hit it on the head in the Washington Examiner last October when he wrote,

    “Nearly every Republican voted against President Obama’s stimulus in 2009, arguing that the deficit was too high, that government shouldn’t be in the game of picking winners and losers, and that Washington doesn’t create jobs.  But the EDA adds to the deficit, picks winners and losers, and purports to create jobs.  If Republicans vote to continue the EDA, they flaunt their hypocrisy to critics.”  I have to agree.

    I appreciate that the appropriations bills are making incremental improvements in the status quo, but these are times that demand much more than that.  When members vote for these appropriations bills, they are responsible for the spending – and the waste – in them. 

    And this spending is simply indefensible.  Doling out grants with little if any accountability, this ought to be the poster child for waste in government. 

    I appreciate the fact that the leadership has agreed to an open amendment process, giving us the opportunity to correct this particular oversight on the floor.  But the fact of the matter is that the House is ill-equipped to comprehensively address this kind of waste from the floor and we must do better both as authorizing committees and the appropriations committee in combing these bills earlier in the process for unconscionable and indefensible expenditures. 

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