Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Appropriations Act, 2012
Floor Speech
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Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Yes. Our intent is to make it clear that States with approved management plans should be given authority to manage delisted wolf populations in their States. The language in the bill ensures that delisting decisions are made by scientists on the ground, not judges in courtrooms.
The report language clarifies that similar bill language should apply to areas where wolves have expanded beyond their original population boundaries once State management plans are in place and the Fish and Wildlife Service determines that the population should be delisted. That language is intended to address States that currently face mixed management challenges, like Washington, Oregon, and Utah.
I know your concern about this issue, and Representative Walden from Oregon has shared with me similar concerns as well.
Mr. HASTINGS of Washington. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for that clarification.
As we both know, the problem goes far beyond wolves. The ESA has nearly 1,400 listed species in the U.S. and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by local, State, Federal, and private entities on ESA activities; yet Federal agencies are being regularly sued for poor science and poorly drafted regulations, and only 20 species have been recovered.
Do you agree with me that the Endangered Species Act is broken and needs to be modernized and updated?
I yield to the chairman.
Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Yes, today's ESA is so highly contentious, political, and litigious that it has become a failure of public policy. Funding authorization for ESA programs expired nearly two decades ago, but because we have continued to fund them, ESA reform continues to stay on the back burner.
This bill calls for a ``timeout'' for unauthorized funding of new critical habitat or ESA listing decisions in order to encourage authorizers and stakeholders to come to the table to bring the ESA into the 21st century, which it is not now.
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Mr. SIMPSON. I thank the gentleman.
It is important that authorizing committees like yours be able to modernize landmark laws like the ESA--laws that were widely supported when they were passed but no longer work as Congress originally intended. No less than 56 agencies or programs in this bill have expired authorizations, and stakeholders and interested Members of Congress should know that these programs are also at risk of defunding if they are not reauthorized. Our bill, hopefully, will provide incentive for stakeholders who have been unwilling to participate in the reform process to finally entertain serious reform of the ESA, which I am sure your committee will actively pursue.
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Mr. SIMPSON. In closing, I thank the Members for the debate that has gone on with regard to this bill.
I notice that Members on the other side of the aisle continually refer to some of the policy provisions that are in this bill as policy rider/special interest legislation. In fact, they were called ``earmark legislation'' in this bill, but they are special interest.
Let me tell you that the only special interest that I care about right now are the unemployed people in this country who are looking for a job. If you talk to any business in this country, the one thing they will tell you is the uncertainty created by the potential regulation and proposed regulation by the EPA is stopping them from expanding their businesses because they have no idea--no idea--what it's going to cost to hire a new employee.
They are the biggest wet blanket on our economy that we have today, so we need to do something about it. We need to rein them back in because they are totally out of control. That's what this bill does.
This is under an open rule. That means Members will have the opportunity, if they have different ideas and if they can get a majority of the votes, to remove some of these things. If so, they can remove them, but I'd suspect more are going to be added rather than removed as this bill moves through its full consideration.
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Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment offered by my friend and colleague from Virginia.
Honoring our Nation's obligations to American Indians and Alaskan Natives is an unshakable bipartisan sentiment shared by Members of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee and is an accomplishment in this bill that I am most proud of. This bill increases funding for Indian Health Services by $392 million over the current fiscal year while almost virtually everything else is being cut, a 10 percent increase that also happens to be one of the rare and, by far, the largest increases in this bill. This bill includes the same $19 billion cut for sanitation facilities that was proposed by the President. And I note that the President's Indian Health Service budget was an additional $162 million higher than this bill.
The problem is the offset. The BLM's management of land resources account has already been cut by $43.5 million below the FY 2011 and $15.5 million below the President's budget request. This account funds the management of the BLM's more than 245 million surface acres and 700 million subsurface acres. Further cuts to this account are not appropriate.
Mr. Chairman, am I proud of the increases we were able to provide in this bill and in previous bills by my predecessors Mr. Moran and Mr. Dicks? You bet I am. Will I continue to fight for more funding for Indian country despite the attacks from virtually every other interest group who isn't happy with their share of the pie? You bet I will. Will I stand by and let my friend and colleague from Virginia continue to systematically dismantle the budget of the largest landowner in the West, the BLM? Absolutely not. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this amendment.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this amendment, and while I appreciate my good friend from Kansas's passion for cutting spending, the reality is that this is exactly what we're doing. This bill comes in under the allocation. We passed the budget earlier this year on the floor--we're the only body to have passed a budget, actually. The Senate has not passed one yet. We were given an allocation, and this bill comes in under that allocation.
We all know that we cannot balance this budget simply by cutting, but we also know that reducing Federal spending is a necessary priority and a first step toward getting us toward a balanced budget.
I think that this amendment goes too far. It would take $3 billion from the numerous accounts in this bill, including the BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, NEA and NEH, as was mentioned, and transfer it to the budget reduction account.
While I appreciate the gentleman's concern that he expressed about the impact that the EPA is having in this country on job creation, and I have said repeatedly that when I go out and give a speech somewhere to a chamber of commerce or Lions Club or whatever, I'll talk about the Interior bill and the agencies that we fund, and when I get to the EPA, someone in the audience will say, Just defund it, get rid of it, and it's the first applause line in the speech. That's the reputation the EPA has out in the public, and that's the concern that the public has about the direction that the EPA is headed.
So I appreciate the gentleman's concern about the EPA; but as I try to explain to people, you can't just do away with the EPA because if you're out there and you have a business and the underlying law requires you to get an air quality permit or a water permit or something like that and you call the EPA to get your air quality permit and no one's there to answer the phone, to help you with that, then you've got a problem. We don't want to eliminate the EPA. What we want to do is rein the EPA back in, because I think they've got an overly aggressive agenda; and, as I have said, I think they're the biggest wet blanket on the growth in our economy that there is.
I rise in opposition to the amendment, and I would hope that my colleagues would oppose the amendment.
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