The Honorable Randy Neugebauer
United States House of Representatives
429 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Neugebauer:
On behalf of the more than 350,000 members of the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), I write to offer our endorsement for H.R. 6176, your "Responsible Emergency Appropriation Limits (REAL) Supplemental Act," designed to reform the broken emergency supplemental appropriations process. NTU has long supported tighter restrictions on supplemental spending in order to prevent wasteful and irrelevant expenditures.
The current process by which supplemental funds are appropriated is a taxpayer's nightmare. Supplemental bills have evolved into omnibus appropriations for various unrelated needs, rife with earmarks that provide funding for pet projects.
The absence of institutional boundaries in the supplemental appropriations process has led to phenomenal waste. Just this past May, Congress passed a supplemental with more than $90 billion in spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, relief for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and preparation for a possible flu pandemic. Included in the Senate version of the legislation were provisions that would fund highway rebuilding in Hawaii, riverbank protection in California, and payments to New England shell fishermen. Though not all extraneous provisions ended up in the final bill, they are indicative of the trend of loading supplementals with parochial spending and pure pork.
Your bill would improve matters by requiring that a supplemental fund only one emergency, that all spending be related to that emergency, and that any earmark appearing in a supplemental bill be subject to a point of order. Such an approach would close many of the loopholes that allow supplementals to become multi-billion-dollar targets for abuse.
American taxpayers deserve an honest and restrained approach to emergency supplemental spending. Continuing to heap billions of dollars onto the federal deficit is neither wise nor sustainable. H.R. 6176 will make emergency supplementals live up to their name: spending for true emergencies, not special interest projects for powerful Members of Congress.
We thank you for your commitment and look forward to working with you in the future to make disciplined appropriations a reality. Any roll call votes on the REAL Supplemental Act will be significantly weighted in our annual Rating of Congress.
Sincerely,
Andrew Moylan
Government Affairs Manager