Hearings to examine strengthening American competitiveness, focusing on the roles of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, Export-Import Bank, and Millennium Challenge Corporation.
Senate Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs
2024-05-15
Source: Congress.gov
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Good morning. This hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development will please come to order. We are here today to discuss President Biden's fiscal year 2025 budget request for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation. I'm pleased to welcome our witnesses today who I'll introduce shortly to the subcommittee. And I'm glad to be chairing a subcommittee that deals with so many issues that are incredibly important to folks back home in Washington State and all across the country. How we manage our resources has tremendous implications for our economic strength and our national security. Likewise, how we manage our water resources directly affects families and farmers, our food supply, and even our fish. And how well we manage our nation's ports and harbors has major implications for our economy as well as local ecosystems. So I look forward to working with Ranking Member Kennedy and all of our colleagues to make sure these issues get the attention and funding they deserve. And today's hearing is an important part of that process. Now I said from the start, I don't think we can make the investments our nation truly needs under the constraints of the Fiscal Responsibility Act. I have listened as colleagues on the other side of the aisle have made the case for more defense funding. I want to be clear, as we discuss additional resources to meet our country's needs, I will be insisting on parity between our new resources for defence and non-defence. Because bottom line, our country's strength, its competitiveness and its future all depend on so many of the essential investments we make on the non-defence side of the ledger. Today's hearing offers a stark reminder of how important so many of those non-defense investments are. That's because water resources managed by the Bureau and the Corps alike irrigate crops, allow those crops and other goods to be transported to consumers here at home and around the world. They help sustain keystone species like salmon in Washington State,
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provide water to over 31 million Americans, and even literally keep the lights on with hydroelectric power. So when it comes to our nation's competitiveness, this is something we cannot take for granted. For the sake of our economy as well as our environment, we need to protect and maintain our waterways for wildlife to thrive and for essential transportation to occur. We have to keep our water running and our ports bustling and our farms irrigated and our fish thriving and our electric grid reliable. These are investments in safety as well. We cannot shortchange safety. We need to make sure communities are safe and prepared for extreme weather events amid the worsening climate crisis with levees and sea walls and nature-based infrastructure to prevent flooding. And let's not forget drought mitigation. We are seeing this issue get worse and worse with historic drought conditions in recent years. This is a challenge that ripples throughout our nation, hurting farmers, threatening families and wildlife with wildfires, and undermining our economy. So when we talk about investments for the year ahead, make no mistake, water is just too important to our families and our economy and our nation, to take for granted. I'm glad that despite tough funding caps, we were able to deliver critical resources for both the Bureau and the Corps in the FY24 bill that Congress recently passed. including an historic funding level for Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund to keep our nation's ports and harbors in good condition. Of course, I've been working hard to make sure Washington State ports get their fair share of that HMTF. For too long, that was not the case. And even after I authored and passed legislation to fix that in 2020, I was frustrated to see the Army Corps work plan for FY23 fall short. I raised this several times with Corps leadership, including at our hearing last year, and included language in our FY24 bill on this matter, so I'm pleased that we're finally seeing real progress.
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The work plan the Army Corps released Monday shows a much-needed course correction. It implements the law as Congress intended it, which makes a meaningful difference for ports like the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma to the tune of $25 and $29 million from the HMTF this year alone. So I appreciate you taking my call, Assistant Secretary, and working with me on this. Now in addition to the Army Corps work plan, I should also mention how President Biden's budget request shows how he understands how important these issues are. I was especially pleased to see this budget include $500 million for the Howard Hansen Dam Fish Passage Project. Saving our salmon is a top priority for me because salmon are a way of life in Washington State. This project will open up over 100 miles of prime habitat for salmon and has the potential to produce more salmon than any other project in our region. That's why I've worked so hard in our past bills to secure funding to move that forward. And I want to make sure we deliver this historic funding in this budget request so we can see that project through. and I look forward to hearing more from our witnesses about this work and more shortly. With that, I want to turn it over to my ranking member, Kennedy. It's a delight to be working with you again on this.
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