[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17978]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                              ABOLISH DOE

  (Mr. ROYCE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Speaker, $30,000 should be enough to purchase a nice 
car or make a down payment on a house or pay for a couple of years of 
college, but $30,000 should not be enough to buy a $9 million 
supercomputer especially when the technology has the potential to be 
exported for nuclear weapons research. But that is exactly what the 
Department of Energy has allowed to happen, and when the DOE officials 
realized their mistake, they scrambled to buy the computer back for 
three times the sales price.
  Now this just does not compute.
  The Department has proven time and time again that it does not put a 
premium on national security, and that is why I have introduced my 
bill, H.R. 2411, which would eliminate this multibillion-dollar 
bureaucracy with confused missions and questionable priorities. 
Frankly, these are responsibilities that should be handled again by the 
Department of Defense. We should abolish this agency.
  It is time we stopped the Department of Energy from turning our 
national labs into garage sales. I urge my colleagues to take a closer 
look at this risk to America's national security interests.

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