Every so often, a situation in Congress comes along that perfectly illustrates a point.

 

For a long time, I have been defending earmark reform because we need to eliminate unneeded spending – and at the same time we must defend the quality expenditures identified by those who know their districts best. 

 

This week, in the U.S. House of Representatives, an Arizona congressman tried to remove a Southern Missouri project from a spending bill.  This project was requested by me because it can pay dividends for every taxpayer in the nation.  The representative’s amendment would have stripped just this one project of $750,000 from a $30 billion piece of legislation.

 

Great suspicion exists of any federal spending that is directed to a specific source for a specific purpose – so I was glad to have the opportunity to publicly defend a worthwhile project in Southern Missouri.

 

Allow me to illustrate the point.

 

The Missouri Forest Foundation would get $750,000 from a $30 billion dollar legislative
proposal to fund the nation’s Energy and Water needs.  This money would help solve the crisis of our time – American reliance on foreign oil.  This investment in Missouri would pay off by finding a viable source of cellulosic ethanol in wood waste from mostly unmanageable parts of our nation’s forests.  As a source of Green Energy, cellulosic ethanol is limited only by our ability to harvest small trees from overgrown, unmanaged forests and generate cellulosic ethanol on a profitable scale.  This project would remove many of those barriers to our energy market.

 

And in the meantime we will add value to our forests – 14 million acres of them in Missouri alone.  We will create another value-added product to help our rural economies.  And we will put more ethanol into the market, encouraging the use of a clean, renewable fuel.

 

 It is unconscionable to turn our backs on any project to put something besides oil in the tanks of American cars and trucks, especially when it is as promising as this one.

 

But some members of Congress don’t always see the ethanol-producing forest for the trees.  Like other federal spending, the Missouri Forest Foundation is supporting added value for a critical sector of the rural Missouri economy.  Similarly, making Highway 60 and Highway 67 wider and safer is certainly not a wasteful effort.  Neither is funding for Southern Missouri  flood protection or drug task forces.

 

And finally, if Congress does not identify this project, it doesn’t save the taxpayers one red cent.  The $750,000 would still be spent and charged to the taxpayers’ account, but the Office of Management and Budget – a collection of Washington Bureaucrats who have never set foot in Southern Missouri – would be making the call on how to spend it.  Our district would be left out in the cold.

 

The appropriations process should not be the target of a debate over the level of federal spending – this debate should occur when Congress decides how much it will spend in the coming year – when we pass our budget.  Now is the time to make sure we get the best return on our tax dollars, and bring some of them back home to work.  I can think of few better purposes than putting them to work on the problem of high gas prices and limited supplies of oil.

 

In the meantime, whenever one of these worthwhile projects is questioned, you will find me in the House of Representatives, publicly extolling the virtues of the return on our tax dollars in Southern Missouri.