[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 160 (Thursday, November 13, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2385]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       H.R. 2203, ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT APPROPRIATIONS ACT

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. J. DENNIS HASTERT

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, November 13, 1997

  Mr. HASTERT. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join my colleagues in the 
House in supporting the fiscal year 1998 energy and water development 
appropriations conference agreement, and I applaud Chairman McDade and 
the ranking member of the subcommittee Vic Fazio, for their work to 
finalize this appropriations bill.
  This conference agreement provides funding for the Department of 
Energy [DOE], and I want to take this opportunity to highlight one 
important investment this bill makes at DOE. The Department of Energy 
supports scientists and experimental facilities at universities and 
national laboratories around the country that conduct basic research in 
important scientific disciplines--including materials and chemical 
sciences, biological, and environmental sciences, and high energy and 
nuclear physics. In my home State of Illinois, the Fermi National 
Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory are outstanding 
examples of the kind of facilities and scientists that are supported by 
this bill through the DOE.
  It is important to underscore that for the chemical and physical 
sciences, the DOE is as important as the National Institutes of Health 
[NIH] and the National Science Foundation [NSF] are to other research 
disciplines. DOE has a long history of supporting important basic 
research, and I note with some interest that this conference agreement 
recognizes DOE's critical role in our national investment in 
fundamental research by giving a new collective name to these programs, 
called simply the science account. I urge my colleagues to support this 
science account because, like our investments in NSF and NIH, these are 
dollars that help build our future by supporting the people and 
facilities that conduct fundamental research.
  The research portfolio supported through DOE's science account, 
including high energy physics, has been under significant budget 
pressure in recent years and funding had gradually eroded. Unlike NSF 
and NIH, the basic research programs at DOE have not seen even modest 
increases in recent years and are losing ground to inflation. While I 
support the funding levels provided in this conference agreement, I 
call on the administration to strengthen these programs as it works to 
put together its fiscal year 1999 budget. The administration must keep 
the science account strong, and I believe that the public and the 
Congress will support these programs at higher levels.
  At Fermilab, scientists from around the country operate the world's 
highest-energy particle accelerator and only hadron collider. The 
experimental devices at Fermilab are operated as user facilities which 
allow researchers from all over the world to come to the lab to conduct 
their research. For 30 years now, Fermilab has been the center of 
research and discovery in high energy physics, the place where the top 
quark, the smallest known element of matter, was first observed. The 
funding provided in this bill will continue to keep Fermilab and the 
United States at the cutting edge of high energy physics for the next 
decade.
  This bill provides funding for a portion of the U.S. contribution to 
the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], a facility that is being planned for 
construction in Europe. This past year, the Congress worked with the 
administration to ensure that our contribution to this device is 
appropriate and fair, that American scientists have an appropriate role 
in the research agenda for the device, and that American taxpayers are 
protected. I am satisfied with the efforts to ensure that we have the 
strongest possible international agreement knowing that scientific 
discovery is a global enterprise.
  The Department of Energy is a large agency with a complex set of 
missions. We are all stakeholders in the success of DOE in its critical 
missions, including science and technology, and I look forward to 
working on the myriad of issues facing DOE in the months ahead.

                          ____________________