Speech #980177953

I understand. however. that as of this date no reprogramming request has been received by the Appropriations Committee. of national public interest to one of local financial impact. Second. we believe that much of the problems in this area derive from directives of your Office of Management and Budget. and are not necessarily at the program level within HHS. Specifically. we strongly disagree with ORRs proposed FY84 funding levels for refugee and entrant social services and targeted assistance. While. on the surface. our difficulties may appear to involve a misinterpretation of the amounts appropriated for these programs in Public Law 98151. making further continuing appropriations for FY84. at the heart of the matter lies a more serious misundertanding of the reasons Congress has fashioned these important programs. We believe that the Congress has made very clear that the objective of the Refugee Act is to help those persons granted refuge in the United States to adjust to the truly "new world" in which so many find themselves and to become selfsufficient as soon as possible. The key to this selfsufficiency is the social services program. specifically provided with a line item authorization by Congress to underscore its critical role in this regard. Unfortunately. because of the manner in which ORR continues to base its funding request for this program. evidenced most recently in its notice of proposed FY84 social services funding in the Federal Register of February 13. 1984. this goal continues to be thwarted. Despite very strong language in both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees Reports accompanying the Refugee Assistance Amendments of 1982 (Public Law 97363) rejecting the Administrations FY83 social service funding request as both "inadequate and premised on an unsound theory" and reiterating Congressional intent that "the proper focus should be on the number of refugees who need such services. regardless of their date of entry." ORR has admitted once again in testimony this week before the House Appropriations Committee to having used a unit formula based on recent arrivals. We find this blatant circumvention of clear Congressional intent to be inexcusable. This is made even more the case given the adoption by the House of Representatives of the Refugee Assistance Extension Act of 1983. H.R. 3729. on November 14. 1983. The House Judiciary Committees Report accompanying this measure (House Report No. 98404) once again stressed that the Committee "flatly rejected the theory upon which the Administrations fiscal year 1983 social services budget request was made." The Report went on to note that the Committee was "disturbed" that the FY84 social service funding request was again based on anticipated flows. and reiterated that it saw "no basis in law or logic for such an approach." Instead. the Committee once again asserted that "the proper focus should be on the number of refuees that need such services." Can there be any doubt. then. as to the manner in which social service funding requests are to be developed? We think not. and yet ORR gives its FY83 unit formula as the basis for its FY84 budget request which it now insists is all that is available to the social services program under the Continuing Resolution. However. even ORR admits that the $44.4 million derived in this manner is inadequate. and proposes to transfer $20 million in targeted assistance funds to the social services program "in order to avoid serious disruptions or terminations of services which would affect refugees currently receiving services or expected to receive services during the year." While we are not convinced that even the $64 million level of funding for social services is adequate. we are particularly frustrated that this total is to be achieved by a transfer from the $81.5 million in targeted assistance funds ORR has available to it for FY84. Once again. we believe that ORR is ignoring the basic reason Congress provided funding for targeted assistance. In its materials offered in support of the FY85 budget request. ORR links the funding level for targeted assistance with the number of refugees who have been in the United States for three years or less and categorizes this special funding as having been "created to deal with unanticipated high levels of refugee admissions." We submit that this is not at all the case. Targeted assistance funds have been provided by the Congress to alleviate the fiscal and social impact on State and local governments as a result of large concentrations of refugees and entrants. For example. while there was an inordinately high number of refugee admissions in 1981 (159.000). the need for "a supplementation of currently available resources for services to refugees" in certain countiesto use ORRs own words in setting forth the criteria for the allocation of targeted assistance funds in June of 1983was not the result of the overall number of admissions. but their concentration in a very few selected areas of the country. Therefore. to reason that the amount of and need for targeted assistance funds will automatically decline in some direct proportion to the number of recent arrivals and the number of years that have passed since admissions peaked in 198081 is to ignore the very purpose of this supplemental funding. Such an approach fails to acknowledge the fact that since 1975. one State aloneCaliforniahas become the home for almost 50 per cent of all refugees resettled in the United States. more refugees than at least the next eight most heavily impacted States combined. Such an approach ignores the fact that almost onethird of refugees receiving aid in California were initially resettled in other States. In summary. the results for many counties and municipalities of such a "targeting" of this specialneeds population were the very reasons that targeted assistance was funded. The House Judiciary Committee has stressed this purpose in its Report accompanying H.R. 3759. mentioned earlier. by specifically instructing ORR -that "the legislation. unlike the Administrations program. anticipates that funding allocations will be made on the basis of a countys total refugee population. not just those refugees who have been in the United States for three years or less." Unfortunately. ORR has ignored this directive and published an allocation formula for FY84 targeted assistance funds that has the same basis as that which the Committee specifically repudiated. Furthermore. the House Judiciary Committee Report goes on to emphasize that "targeted assistance grants should not supplant other refugee program funds." Howev-