GOP unveils $51.6B DOT, HUD budget

{mosads}Rodgers also said the 2013 transportation and HUD appropriations bill “funds important housing programs at responsible levels for Americans that need them, while scrubbing the HUD budget to find and eliminate excess, wasteful, or unnecessary spending.”

Appropriations subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Chairman Tom Latham (R-Iowa) added that the legislation will “meet our nation’s transportation and housing needs while remaining fiscally responsible and accountable to hardworking American taxpayers.

“This legislation continues my goal and dedicated work of ending the budgeting gimmicks and accounting tricks that have plagued Washington in recent years,” he said. 

However, Democrats on the appropriations committee assailed the measure for cutting the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development departments’ budgets. 

“As we are witnessing in Europe, austerity is not working and shouldn’t be replicated here,” the ranking Democrat on the panel, Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), said in a statement released by his office.
 
“Due to House Republican infighting over the surface transportation bill and their unwillingness to compromise in conference negotiations, our Republican majority has had to resort to place-holder language in this bill for several important transportation provisions, not least of which, the funding level for the federal highway program,” Dicks continued. “The reckless partisan brinkmanship of House Republicans on this traditionally bipartisan infrastructure bill is appalling.”

The transportation and HUD bill does not have a “sufficient allocation,” Dicks added, but he allowed that he appreciated “that our majority has made an effort to protect several important transportation and low-income housing programs.”

This post was updated with new information at 12:31 p.m.