[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 78 (Wednesday, June 5, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H3101-H3102]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  STOPPING UNAUTHORIZED APPROPRIATIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the House leadership 
for its continuing commitment to restore the open appropriations 
process of the House.
  That process is absolutely essential if the House is to meet its 
constitutional responsibility to superintend the Nation's finances. It 
assures that the people's elected Representatives can provide the 
maximum scrutiny of every public expenditure.
  In the recent past, this process has given way to continuing 
resolutions that simply rubber-stamp past Federal spending, thus 
abrogating Congress' most fundamental fiscal responsibility. For this 
reason, I, for one, will not support any continuing resolutions of this 
nature.
  The regular order over the Nation's finances must be reasserted, and 
the open appropriations process that has begun in the House this week 
does so. That process, though, is the final step in the procedures 
established to ensure that our Nation's spending gets careful 
examination. The first step in that process--and the most important 
step--is when programs are authorized or reauthorized. Legislation must 
first be adopted that establishes the programs for which money is 
subsequently appropriated.
  That is an absolutely critical function that ensures Federal programs 
are constantly being scrutinized and that Congress is asking: Are these 
programs effective? Are they meeting their goals? Are they worthwhile? 
Are they worth the money we're paying? Most programs have time limits 
on them to ensure that these questions are periodically asked.
  The legal authorization, then, is the green light to the 
Appropriations Committee to provide funding for that program. And for 
that reason, since 1835, the rules of the House have limited 
appropriations to only those purposes actually authorized by law. 
Unless and until the program is authorized, the House may not 
appropriate funds for it under this longstanding rule. Yet this rule is 
routinely ignored by the Appropriations Committee and by the House.
  Last year, the appropriations bills reported out of the committee 
contained over $350 billion for programs that had either never been 
authorized or whose authorizations had lapsed years, and sometimes 
decades, ago. Many of these are vital programs whose reauthorization 
should be routine, but many are not. For example, the Community 
Development Block Grant program that paid for a doggy day care center 
in Ohio and a day at the circus for Nyack, New York, lapsed 18 years 
ago; and yet every year we keep funding it lavishly.
  Most of the outrageous wastes of taxpayer money that end up in 
various pork reports stem from these lapsed programs. They're 
established, then they're forgotten, and the spending keeps on year 
after year.

[[Page H3102]]

  The excuse for this conduct is that the authorizing committees have 
simply failed to attend to their duties of keeping authorizations 
current, including for a number of critical functions, and so the 
Appropriations Committee takes it upon itself to fund them.
  What's to prevent this? The House rules allow any Member the right to 
raise a point of order against any unauthorized expenditure, but this 
right is stripped from Members every time an appropriations bill is 
sent to the House floor, making this rule meaningless and 
unenforceable.
  It has now reached the point that more than one-third of the 
discretionary spending approved by the House is for purposes not 
authorized by law. This fact makes a mockery of the leadership's effort 
to restore regular order to the appropriations process.
  I urge the Speaker of the House to direct the authorizing committees 
to bring the authorizations current for every program within their 
respective jurisdictions and to give them a year to do so. If, after a 
full year, the authorizing committees don't believe the programs are 
worth the time to review, then maybe that's just nature's way of 
warning us that they're also not worth the money that we continue to 
shovel at them.
  Once the committees have had that year to review these unauthorized 
programs and to either renew them, reform them, or let them die, I urge 
the House to restore the right of every Member to challenge 
unauthorized appropriations on the floor as our rules clearly envision 
and provide.

                              {time}  1020

  Americans elected a House Republican majority with one clear mandate: 
stop wasting our money. To be worthy of that trust, we can't allow 
hundreds of billions of dollars to bypass the minimal congressional 
review that the authorizing process provides.

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