The Senator from New Hampshire explains:
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, let me begin by saying that when I read the article that was in the paper about the decision to basically transfer a significant amount of dollars from New York and Washington, I was surprised and quite shocked. I said to myself: That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Because I think most of us understand that New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, and a couple of other spots which are probably better not to mention, are truly the No. 1 targets. Certainly, New York is at the top of every list, as is the city of Washington. So I thought: Why are we doing that? Or why was the Department doing that? They did not advise us, obviously.
I looked into it, and they have a peer-review process for the application of these funds. All these funds go out under a threat-based concept. This has been the insistence of this committee. There are funds that do go out under the formula. I do not happen to be a big fan of the formula. It is not a lot of funds compared to the entire block of funds. But the vast majority of the funds flow out on the basis of threat-based decisions.
Now, what happened was, of the 46 cities that were in competition for these funds, New York came in 44th and the District of Columbia came in 42nd in evaluation of their proposals. And their proposals, in fact, were just plain poorly written; not only poorly written, they were poorly structured, and they did not have behind them the backup that was necessary to make them viable proposals.
In that context, the decision was made to take these funds and move them over to other applicants who had put in better proposals. I guess if I had been managing the Department, what I would have said is: Listen, we know that Washington and New York are the primary targets. We also know these proposals, as they came forward, were just not very good proposals and really did not accomplish the goals we are seeking in the issue of addressing threat and effectiveness. And effectiveness should be part of this. We should not take effectiveness out because there is no point sending money out if we are not going to get results for it.
Probably, if I had been in charge, had the magic wand, I would have said, escrow this money until we can work with these two cities, and regions in the case of New York and Washington, and get the plans in order. But that is not the decision that was made. The decision was made to move the dollars to other locales. So there are equities, in my opinion, in the arguments made by the Senators from New York and the Senators from Maryland and New Jersey. And the equities are strong enough that we actually put language in our report that requests that the Department place a higher priority on risk and that they focus on dealing with this type of a situation. And I am certainly expecting it will not happen again the way it happened this year.
But that is not the essence of this amendment. The essence of this amendment offered by the Senator from New York is to increase funding above our allocation--I guess it claims it as an emergency--and to basically put additional dollars on the table for the purposes of these types of threat-based grants.
Now, I think it is important to understand that since we started this program we have put $14.6 billion into the pipeline to try to assist the cities and areas of highest risk, and that in this bill we have $2.4 billion to accomplish that. That is a lot of money. And of that money, only $6.1 billion has actually been taken down. In other words, there is still literally close to $9 billion when you consider this year of money available to address these issues. And to put another big chunk of money on top of that, really, I do not think is going to improve the situation from the standpoint of what New York and Washington are concerned about, because I think there is enough money in the pipeline to accomplish much of what they desire.
The right way to correct this problem relative to New York and Washington is to have the Department understand these are the priority sites, and that if the proposals coming in from these two regions are not of a quality that give the Department confidence that the money is going to go out and be used effectively, then they should sit down with these two regions and work out the process so we do it right--escrow the money, sit down, work out the problem, figure out how the money can be used so everybody knows it is being use effectively. So that would be the way I would resolve this issue.
They didn't like the way it was written. Apparently, the money was re-allocated from New York to Indiana because New York flunked the written. Sigh! Rethug logic.
Gee, do you think it was a coincidence that money was shifted away from Blue States to Red States in this atrocious bill?