[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 52 (Monday, January 1, 2001)]
[Pages 3163-3167]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Signing the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, 
and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2001

December 21, 2000

    Sit down. Thank you. You just have to do what I ask for a few more 
days. [Laughter]
    First, I'd like to thank the very large delegation from the United 
States Congress and both parties who are here: Senator Specter, Senator 
Conrad, Senator Dorgan; from the House, Chairman Goodling, 
Representative Obey, Representative Kildee, Representative Kelly, 
Representative Talent, Representative Porter, Lowey, and Clement. Did I 
get everybody? [Laughter]
    I'd like to thank the mayor of Philadelphia, John Street, for 
joining us; and our neighbor, the Prince George's County Executive, 
Wayne Curry; and the members of the Cabinet who are here: Secretaries 
Riley, Shalala, Summers, Herman, Slater; EPA Director Browner; SBA 
Director Alvarez. Did I leave anybody out? Chief of Staff Podesta and my 
Economic Adviser Gene Sperling. And I'd like to thank Jack Lew and 
Sylvia Mathews and all the people on the budget team who worked so hard 
at OMB for this.
    This is a good day for our country. For 8 years now, we have worked 
in this administration to prepare our country for the new century and a 
whole new era of human affairs by building a nation in which there is 
opportunity for every responsible citizen, a community of all Americans, 
and a nation that leads the world toward greater peace and freedom and 
prosperity. Today we have two more examples of that in implementing our 
strategy of trying to make the right, real choices for America and not 
be trapped in the old, false choices.
    Earlier today, this morning, we announced new steps to preserve our 
environment by cleaning our air, steps that will protect the health of 
all Americans by dramatically reducing pollution from trucks and buses 
powered by diesel fuel, building on the announcements last year to 
reduce pollution from cars and sports utility vehicles. Together, these 
measures will preserve our environment and protect thousands of children 
from the agony of asthma and other respiratory diseases. By the end of 
the decade, because of these steps, every new vehicle sold in the United 
States will be up to 95 percent cleaner than those rolling off the 
assembly line today.
    Again, this was the right, real choice, proving once again that we 
can grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time. And I 
want to thank Carol Browner for her work on this. She's here. Thank you.
    Now, in a few moments it will be my honor to sign the very last 
budget bill I will sign as President. And in so many ways, it could 
truly be said, we saved the best for last. This bill is called the 
Labor-HHS appropriation bill. But more than anything else, it's a bill 
about these children behind me today, about their hopes, their dreams, 
their capacity to learn, and their need to learn about their future and 
the future of our country. Again, it is further proof, as the evidence 
of these distinguished Members of Congress from both parties prove, that 
when we put progress ahead of partisanship, there's no limit to what we 
can do for America and our future.
    We are now in the longest economic expansion in our history. A 
critical part of our strategy to get there was to put our fiscal house 
in order, to replace record deficits with record surpluses. With this 
budget, in spite of the investments--and I would argue because, in part, 
of past investments--we are going to be able to pay off another $200 
billion of our national debt, on track to paying down $560 billion of 
the national debt over the last 4 years and this year. And because 
together we made the right, real choices, we

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were able to increase investment in the things that matter most. That's 
what this budget bill does today.
    And let me just begin with education. Under Secretary Riley's 
leadership, we have worked hard to make the right, real choice--to have 
more investment and higher standards, more accountability, and spend the 
money on the things that the educators tell us work best. Test scores 
are up today, with some of the greatest gains coming in some of the most 
disadvantaged communities. Two-thirds of our high school graduates are 
going on to college; that's up 10 percent from 1993. In the last few 
years, there has been a 300-percent increase in the number of Hispanic 
students taking advanced placement courses and a 500-percent increase in 
the number of African-American students doing so.
    With the largest student enrollment in our entire history, and the 
most diverse student body in our entire history, education must be 
priority number one for any administration. With this budget, while 
turning the largest deficits in history into the largest surpluses, we 
also will have more than doubled funding for education during the life 
of this administration. This clearly is the biggest and best education 
budget in our Nation's history, and it will make a difference in the 
lives of millions of young people. Let me just give a couple of 
examples.
    Our first-ever initiative to renovate classrooms will mean that, 
over time, millions of children will attend more modern, more dignified, 
more functional schools. This is about moving out of housetrailers, and 
it's about going to school in old buildings that provide modern 
education.
    With $1.6 billion on its way to help communities with smaller 
classrooms, we will help roughly 2 million children learn in smaller 
classes, with more individualized attention in the early grades. With 
nearly $1 billion more for Head Start, the largest increase in history, 
we'll have more than doubled the program, adding 60,000 more kids to 
this quality preschool program this year alone.
    There is a dramatic increase in child care in this budget that, 
along with the child care funds provided in welfare reform, will help 
more than 2.2 million kids next year, an increase in nearly a million 
just since 1997. By over doubling funding for after-school programs, we 
are providing 650,000 more students with a safe place to learn, bringing 
to 1.3 million the number of young people benefiting from this after-
school initiative, something that did not even exist 4 years ago.
    With another major increase in the GEAR UP program, 1.2 million 
disadvantaged children will now be preparing for college as early as the 
sixth grade. Together with one of the largest increases in the TRIO 
program ever, we are building greater pathways to college for 
economically disadvantaged young people.
    This bill has the largest increase ever in Pell grants. We've now 
increased the maximum grant by nearly $1,500 since 1993, for 4 million 
young people every year from low and moderate income families. This 
significant expansion of Pell grants is part of the biggest expansion in 
college aid since the GI bill, including the direct student loan 
program, which has saved students $8 billion already in loan repayment 
costs, and the HOPE scholarship tax cut, which 10 million families are 
benefiting from this year.
    I want to say to all of you who worked on this--to Chairman Goodling 
and Mr. Kildee, Mr. Obey, all the other Members of the House; and to 
you, Senator Specter, and the other Senators who are here; and most of 
all to you, Secretary Riley, who is now the longest serving and, I 
believe, clearly the finest Education Secretary our country ever had--I 
thank you all very much. Thank you. This education budget is a real 
tribute to the bipartisan work of this Congress, and I am very grateful.
    The budget also makes good on our commitment to help every community 
share in our Nation's prosperity. This is a big deal to me, and also to 
America's future. About 18 months ago, I began the first of what I 
called new markets tours, to shine a spotlight on people and places that 
had been left behind in this long and remarkable recovery. I wanted 
every American investor to see the potential of these communities and 
the promise of the people who live there.
    I knew that government couldn't do it alone and that, in fact, we 
would have to find

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a way to get more private investment into these communities. But I also 
knew that business could not be expected to go it alone, that we had to 
find some way to bring hope and opportunity home to these communities.
    Now, at the same time, to be fair, there were people in the Congress 
who were interested in this who were struggling for some bipartisan 
consensus to bring free enterprise to parts of America that have been 
left behind. Among them, in the House, were Representative Talent, who 
is here, and J.C. Watts and Danny Davis, who represents Chicago but, 
like me, was born in Arkansas. And there were other groups that were 
looking at this.
    So we all worked together to give you a budget that delivers 
something that I believe is truly unique and significant. It includes 
the landmark new markets and community renewal initiative. It's the most 
significant effort ever to help hard-pressed areas, both rural and 
urban, to lift themselves up through private investment and 
entrepreneurship. It is a triumph of bipartisanship. And again, I want 
to thank those whom I just mentioned--especially you, Mr. Talent--and I 
want to thank the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, who went to 
Chicago with me and Reverend Jackson and without whom we could not have 
passed this important initiative.
    Here's what it does. First, it establishes the first-ever new 
markets tax credit. It sets up a new market venture capital initiative. 
Now, what does all that mean? It basically means if we can get people to 
put money into really depressed areas, all the rest of America will 
share part of the risk by giving them a tax credit to do it. And it's a 
darn good investment.
    We also expanded and strengthened 40 empowerment zones; that's the 
program our administration has run for the last 8 years under the able 
leadership of Vice President Gore. And we created 40 renewal communities 
across our Nation; that's an alternative designed essentially by 
Republicans in the House, with the Democrats who worked with them. And 
we decided that since nobody knows how to do this, we ought to try in 40 
places with each approach and see which one works better, and see what 
works better with each approach. It's a terrific idea, and I only wish I 
was going to be around when all the results come in. [Laughter]
    But over the next--sometime over the next, I'd say, 2 to 4 years, 
probably more like a 4-year period, we'll actually have evidence of what 
happened in the 40 empowerment zones, what happened in the 40 renewal 
communities. That Congress will take the evidence and, I hope, as a 
result of that evidence, will then enact legislation that will 
permanently establish a framework for always encouraging America to 
invest in the areas that otherwise would be left behind.
    And if, like me, you've spent a lot of time in the Mississippi Delta 
or Appalachia or inner-city neighborhoods or on Native American 
reservations, you doubtless have concluded, as I have, that intelligence 
is pretty equally distributed throughout this country and so is the work 
ethic. But we have not yet equally distributed opportunity and access to 
capital. We're trying to figure out how to do it. This is a truly 
historic day, and we did it together, and I am very grateful. Thank you.
    This budget also does more to improve health care and to strengthen 
families and community. And again, I want to thank the Members of 
Congress who are here who had primary responsibility for the health care 
issues, and Secretary Shalala, who has also been with me from day one. 
And we were together yesterday with our sweeping health care privacy 
announcement. She may be the only one of us that is absolutely convinced 
she is getting a promotion, because she's going to become president of 
the University of Miami--[laughter]--and she gets a football team, which 
she does not have in her present job. Thank you.
    This budget includes options for States to enroll tens of thousands 
of uninsured children in the Medicaid program by using schools, public 
housing, and other sites easily acceptable to parents and children.
    Let me explain why this is important. We have got 2.5--since the 
Congress--in the balanced budget bill, Congress adopted the CHIP 
program, the Children's Health Insurance Program, 1997. Since then, 2.5 
million *

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kids have been enrolled. And as a result, this year, for the first time 
in 12 years, the number of people without health insurance in the United 
States went down--for the first time in 12 years. But the money is there 
for five million kids to be enrolled. And we know, from the evidence of 
all of the States that have been particularly vigorous, that if we can 
just find the kids, their parents will sign up.
    * White House correction
    This program provides funds so that we can do CHIP enrollment in 
schools, public housing, and other places where the people are. It also 
provides options for States to help low-income seniors enroll in 
programs that cover their Medicare premiums and copayments. It provides 
critical support to those moving from welfare to work by ensuring that 
working does not mean losing your health care. It ensures quality health 
care services for people on Medicare by investing about $30 billion in 
hospitals, home health agencies, hospices, nursing homes, and managed 
care plans.
    And this is very important. I admire the Congress for doing this. We 
adopted the Balanced Budget Act in '97. We adopted some substantive 
changes in our Medicare program that we thought would produce a certain 
level of savings. They produced more savings than we estimated, at great 
cost to the quality of health care, or the capacity of our providers to 
do it. So they asked us to make some corrections, and we did. And that's 
what this is. It's a very, very good thing for America.
    The other thing this bill does, that I think will be very important 
to people for a very long time, is that it expands preventive benefits 
like cancer and glaucoma screenings for Medicare beneficiaries. It 
creates a new program to provide people with disabilities with 
community-based health care services, and it increases fundings for AIDS 
prevention, research, and treatment.
    Also, it includes a $20.3 billion investment in biomedical research, 
nearly doubling since 1993 our investment in the National Institutes of 
Health. And I would like to say a special word of thanks to a retiring 
Member of Congress, Representative John Porter, who's been a great 
leader in this. Thank you very much.
    The bill provides $11.9 billion in funding for the Department of 
Labor, for funding from job training to eliminating abusive child labor 
practices and promoting education around the world. Nearly 900,000 
dislocated workers will receive support and assistance in their efforts 
to return to work.
    Secretary Herman's here. I'd like to thank her for many things, and 
8 years of service in this administration, 4 in the White House and then 
as Secretary of Labor. But one of the relatively little noticed but, I 
think, profoundly important initiatives that this administration has 
undertaken is to try to eliminate abusive child labor in the United 
States and everywhere it exists in the world. And I thank you for your 
leadership in that regard. I thank you very much.
    Finally, the bill would allow nearly 700,000 immigrants who have 
worked, lived, and paid taxes in the United States for years to stay 
here legally without fear of being separated from their families.
    When I outlined our budget priorities in the State of the Union last 
January, I urged Congress to work with me to pass a fiscally responsible 
budget that would be true to our values and invest in the capacity and 
future of the American people. I recall the good advice of President 
Theodore Roosevelt, who said that a growing nation with a future takes 
the long look ahead. This budget takes the long look ahead, to educate 
our children, renew our communities, and build our common future. I am 
very proud of it and very grateful. If we stay on this course, our best 
days are ahead.
    Thank you very much. Now I'd like the Congress and the members of 
the administration to come up.

 Note:  The President spoke at 2:03 p.m. in Presidential Hall in the 
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. H.R. 4577, the 
Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2001, approved December 21, 
incorporating H.R. 5656, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human 
Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2001, 
was assigned Public Law No. 106-554. This item was not received in time 
for publication in the appropriate issue.

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