[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15881]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1600
                        HURRICANE RELIEF BAILOUT

  (Mr. ROTHFUS asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. ROTHFUS. Madam Speaker, buried in today's disaster supplemental 
spending bill is a $16 billion taxpayer bailout of the National Flood 
Insurance Program. That is nearly half the cost of this bill. This 
bailout does not come with a single reform that would put the program 
on the path to sustainability.
  This taxpayer bailout maintains a program that has resulted in 
taxpayer-subsidized development and reconstruction of homes that 
repeatedly flood.
  Madam Speaker, why are we not reforming this program that puts 
residents and first responders in harm's way? How much more debt are we 
willing to let this program pile onto the next generation?
  Americans in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands need 
help, and I would have liked to vote for the relief portion of today's 
legislation, but the multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of an 
unreformed program made the bill unacceptable.
  I urge my colleagues to reconsider the path we are on. We could have 
had a bill that not only provided relief to hurricane victims, but 
would have provided relief for taxpayers and the next generation as 
well, but we did not.
  We will get another chance for fiscal sanity in December, when we 
reconsider the additional disaster funding and funding for the rest of 
2018. Let's hope we make better progress at that time.

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