Ranking Member Johnson's Floor Statement on the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act
FLOOR STATEMENT BY HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON
ON THE “CUT, CAP, AND BALANCE ACT” (H.R. 2560)
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 2560, the Republican “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act,” which is before us today. I am sorry that the House of Representatives has to spend any time on this deeply flawed piece of legislation instead of dealing with the host of serious issues facing our nation.
I have limited time, so I am not going to try today to cover all of the significant problems inherent in H.R. 2560; I know that there are other Members who plan to address many of the issues I care about, such as the central truth that this bill would end the Medicare guarantee. That in itself is reason enough to oppose H.R. 2560, but I also want to highlight the devastating impact this bill would have on our nation’s competitiveness, our ability to innovate, and our ability to create the jobs of the future.
As written, the legislation before us today would cut non-security discretionary spending for FY 2012 by $76 billion. That translates into a 25% cut in budget authority next year with similar draconian cuts in the years that follow. What will be the impact of cuts of that magnitude? They will be profound and will inflict long-term damage to our nation’s well-being. Let me give just a few examples.
First, let’s consider the impact of such a cut on the programs that help to predict severe weather, something that has been a particular concern in many parts of the nation this year. With these cuts, Mr. Speaker, we would essentially be guaranteeing a diminished national capability for weather forecast and prediction, especially of severe weather events. Why? Because a 25% cut to our polar and geostationary weather satellite programs will delay NOAA’s ability to procure follow-on weather satellites that provide the weather data needed 7 days a week, 24 hours a day to make accurate long-term weather forecasts.
What will happen? Well, for one thing, we won’t get 10-day weather forecasts; the best we’ll get with good accuracy are 48-hour weather predictions. Farmers, emergency management officials, military planners, fisherman, coastal residents and marine transportation capabilities, the tourism industry, and all Americans and other American businesses will be operating with weather predictions that are severely diminished in accuracy. When it comes to extreme weather events such as those that we’ve been experiencing across the nation, diminished weather forecasting directly increases the risk of loss of lives and property, not to mention the widespread economic losses that come from our inability to prepare for such extreme events.
Mr. Speaker, why would Congress want to “go blind” to severe weather and put our people and our economic infrastructure at risk, especially when our economic recovery is so fragile and Americans are struggling daily to make ends meet?
Turning now to NSF, while it’s difficult to quantify the devastating impacts of a 25% cut to the NSF budget, we can roughly estimate that such a cut would lead to the reduction of over 17,000 research grants: about 16,500 funded by the various Research Directorates, and 750 funded by the Education and Human Resources Directorate.
We cannot predict where the next scientific breakthroughs will come from, or which research grant will lead to the next Google or GPS. So not only will these budget cuts affect over 200,000 people supported by NSF, including graduate students, undergraduates, K-12 teachers, and K-12 students, but these cuts will most certainly significantly harm our nation’s ability to innovate, create jobs, and compete in the global economy.
With these kinds of budget cuts, we will be supporting less cutting-edge research and building fewer critically important scientific research user facilities, but perhaps the biggest problem is the loss of human capital. China and Europe are increasing funding for research and building world class research facilities while we are heading in the opposite direction. Those countries are successfully recruiting our best and brightest as we successfully recruited theirs for many decades.
Such steep cuts to the National Science Foundation will cause vital investments in sustainability, leading edge technology, and STEM education to be greatly delayed, reduced, or altogether cancelled. These investments include support for:
· NSF-wide emphasis on Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability, including vital investments in clean energy research;
· major investments critical to job creation and competitiveness, such as advanced manufacturing and the National Robotics Initiative;
· pathbreaking efforts to improve pre-college and undergraduate education, including the Teacher Learning for the Future program and new investments to transform undergraduate science courses.
A budget cut of even 5% to NSF’s Major Research Equipment and Facilities and Construction account would result in the termination of approximately $100 million in contracts to industry for work in progress on major facilities for environmental and oceanographic research. This would directly lead to layoffs of roughly 100 direct scientific and technical staff, with larger impacts at supplier companies. In addition, costs over the life of these projects would increase by over $100 million because of delays in the construction schedule. Again, this is the potential scenario with a 5% cut—not the 25% cut to discretionary authorizations included in the bill before us today.
The National Science Foundation is the premier STEM education research organization in the country. For decades, NSF has been a leader in improving our collective understanding of how students learn, and how we can develop the most effective and inspiring curriculum and train the most effective and inspiring teachers. The education research being funded at NSF is critical to helping us to better understand what works and what doesn’t, so that we can invest in programs that will really make a difference in our schools. Cuts to STEM education at NSF not only will directly impact many students and teachers across the country, but it will greatly limit our ability to improve the state of education in this country for every student and every teacher.
We cannot afford to make cuts to STEM education at a time when other countries are consistently outperforming us on international tests. For example, in the 2009 PISA, American schoolchildren ranked 17th out of 34 OECD countries in science. Shanghai-China, Finland, Hong Kong- China, and Singapore were the highest performers in the science assessment. Furthermore, American schoolchildren ranked 25th out of 34 OECD countries for math. Shanghai-China, Singapore, and Hong Kong-China ranked first, second and third in math, respectively. This is simply not the time for us to be cutting funding for critical STEM education programs at the NSF.
Mr. Speaker, the bad news in this bill does not end there. The impact on NASA is equally grim. For example, a 25% reduction to NASA’s Space Operations account is over $1 billion. This cut could cause NASA to reduce the number of cargo and crew transportation flights to the International Space Station, thereby jeopardizing its agreement with ISS partners to have 6 crew members operate the $100 billion research facility. Delaying contracted for cargo and crew flights from commercial partners and Russia may have financial repercussions. It could render NASA unable to fulfill its agreed-to pension liability payments to Shuttle workers and it could jeopardize our ability to receive data from on-going deep space missions by not having the money needed to replace critical components in its unreliable and outdated communications network.
A 25% reduction to NASA’s Exploration account would cut almost a billion dollars, further delaying the development of the Space Launch System and Multipurpose Crew Vehicle—NASA’s follow-on human space transportation and exploration vehicles—causing an even greater gap in the ability of a U.S. government-operated human transportation system to access space whenever needed, as well as causing disruption to on-going contracts, possibly requiring extensive layoffs and financial compensation due to terminated contracts and further destabilizing the aerospace industrial base.
A 25% reduction to NASA’s Aeronautics Research account is over $142 million. This will force cuts to NASA’s critically important research in aviation safety and airspace systems and delay work needed by the FAA to increase the capacity and efficiency of the nation’s air transportation system through NextGen modernization. In addition, it will prevent NASA from conducting unique research required to develop environmentally responsible aircraft.
NASA’s science programs would also suffer deep cuts, an outcome that will be doing long-term damage to an area in which the United States has maintained unquestioned leadership. It is doing the challenging R&D projects that keep our companies and workforce at the top of their game—whether it’s landing spacecraft on Mars, acquiring data to understand the complex behavior of our own planet, or carrying out the analysis of data collected from space. Cutting NASA’s science programs by 25% will severely harm our ability to carry out pathbreaking research, such as investigating dark energy, which may lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in our understanding of our Universe. It will also draw the best and brightest who seek inspirational and challenging projects.
A cut of this magnitude would not only preclude new projects, such as those recommended in National Academies decadal surveys, but could even jeopardize missions being readied for launch in FY 2012, such as the Mars Science Laboratory, the NPP weather satellite, and the Radiation Belt Storm Probe, a mission that will help us understand the impact of the radiation belt environment on spacecraft, something with important practical significance.
Mr. Speaker, I don’t want to sit on the sidelines while other nations are the first to announce major scientific discoveries, draw the world’s top science and engineering talent into their fold, and begin to assume leadership in areas where the U.S. has always been on the cutting-edge.
NASA’s education programs would also suffer if this bill ever becomes law.
Mr. Speaker, we tell the youth of this nation to reach for the stars, and NASA is truly one of the agencies that inspire our next generation to dream big and pursue the disciplines that we know are needed to keep our nation strong—science and engineering. However, under this bill, a 25% cut to NASA’s education programs would cripple initiatives such as the Space Grant and EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) programs, minority education projects such as, the Minority Undergraduate Research and Education Project (MUREP) and K-12 teacher training and student opportunities that are so critical to building and stimulating our future capabilities.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, a 25% reduction to NASA’s Cross Agency Support account would have serious implications for NASA’s safety and mission success, NASA’s information technology activities, and our ability to operate NASA Centers across the U.S. I’d hate to think what a cut to NASA’s safety and mission success activities would mean for ensuring the safety of our nation’s astronauts launched into space and the success of the critical functions they and our robotic spacecraft perform. At a time when cybersecurity is being discussed as a key issue across federal agencies, this cut would reduce NASA’s critical information technology functions, including information security. It is highly likely that a cut to the agency operations budgets included in this account could require NASA to shut down NASA Centers lay off additional contractors, and take actions that would have negative repercussions throughout communities and regions at a time when local economies are already stressed and jobs are hard to come by.
Mr. Speaker, this bill is short-sighted; its negative impacts would cost more in the long-term than any immediate budget reductions would save in the short-term.
I urge my colleagues in Congress to vote NO on this bill.
Mr. Speaker, I hope that my remarks give Members and the American public some idea of the harm that enactment of this short-sighted piece of legislation would do, not only to the agencies listed, but also to other important R&D initiatives at the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, and NOAA, to name but a few of the affected agencies.
At the end of the day, Mr.Speaker, this bill is not going to become law. It is simply a diversion from the serious business on which this body should be focusing its attention. However, it is not a harmless diversion. The extreme and ill-considered cuts that would flow from its enactment send a terrible message to our citizens about this House’s priorities. When your car is low on gas, you don’t siphon more out of the tank, yet that is what this bill would do to the nation’s R&D and innovation capabilities. I want the record to be clear that I do not support the cuts in this bill, nor do I support the process under which this bill has come to the House floor. We can—and should—do better.
Thank you and I yield back the balance of my time.
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