[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5718]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     SECURE RURAL SCHOOLS PAYMENTS

  (Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, last week, the United 
States Department of Agriculture announced that over $300 million would 
soon be paid out to States through the Secure Rural Schools program in 
order to compensate for the lost local revenue because of a lack of 
timber harvesting in national forests.
  Last year, the administration decided to retroactively apply 2013 
sequestration cuts to the 2012 SRS funds, and it requested the 
repayment of $17.9 million that has already been distributed to States 
and counties. This decision immediately sparked bipartisan opposition, 
prompting the House Committee on Natural Resources to conduct an 
investigation into the administration's legally questionable actions. 
The investigation found that the White House ordered the sequestration 
cuts for the SRS program and that the administration chose to apply the 
reductions in a manner that made certain that all Secure Rural Schools 
counties felt the hurt.
  Mr. Speaker, I am glad the administration chose against playing more 
politics with this program at the expense of our rural communities, 
including those which I represent in the Allegheny National Forest, but 
in the long run, rural communities wouldn't need additional funding 
through this program if we actually harvested the proper levels of 
timber on these taxpayer-owned lands.

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