Mr. Chairman, I also want to offer my thanks and gratitude to the chairman and ranking member of the subcommittee who, with great grace and dignity, often have to find ways to put 10 pounds' worth of things into a 5-pound bag.

This amendment is one that simply argues that in one case, the COPS program, we are allowing the program to effectively die in this bill; and we must not have that.

First, some of the facts. The COPS program has been an enormous success. From coast to coast, big towns, small cities, police departments as few as five members and as many as the New York City Police Department of 40,000 have benefited enormously from the COPS program.

Over the course of time, the program has not only shrunk but morphed and become more efficient. Many of my colleagues, including in the city of New York, have suggested, well, we need less money for hiring, but we do need more money for things like radios and equipment and cars. So the program has morphed into a block grant. The problem is, it has also hemorrhaged to an enormous degree.

In 1997, there was $1.3 billion allocated by this Congress just for hiring. In last year's bill, we were down to $219 million. What we see here is how this reorganization happened. We have now block granted the entire program into the COPS Enhancement Grant Program, something that, by the way, I support; it gives greater flexibility to police departments. But the bottom line is, we have reduced this to $113 million.

Again, to reiterate, we have taken a program, an enormously successful program that at its high-water mark reached $1.3 billion, not decades ago but in 1997; we are now proposing to cut that to $113 million.

It is so bad, there is so much demand, there are 2,000 applications for hiring grants totaling $511 million last year. So far, they are only able to provide funding for $385 million of them. That is only 15 percent of the eligible States and localities that have been able to get grant funding, because this program has hemorrhaged so far.

Everyone agrees that it works. John Ashcroft praised the program. The University of Nebraska did a study to show the COPS program in a 5-year period resulted in a reduction of 756,000 violent crimes.

And just a word, a brief word, about the offset. We propose to take the funds, and here I want to thank my colleagues, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Keller), the gentleman from New York (Mr. Quinn), the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak), the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ramsted), the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews), the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Holden) and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Platts), to take the money from the largest step-up that is in the bill, which is the Census Bureau.

I have no beef with the Census Bureau. They do a difficult job. They do it every 10 years, and there is a need to ramp it up, but the ramping up that is going on is coming at the cost of the COPS program. Fiscal year 2005, I believe we are going to have other opportunities to ramp up the Census Bureau.

In fact, at this point in the last census, the software for the census had not even been purchased yet. That is how early we are in the process, but I mean no disregard to that bureau. They do an excellent job. Unfortunately, I believe the COPS program deserves greater attention.