Speech #1020090960

The bills authorization levels also adhere strictly to the funding restrictions under the budget resolution. In fact. with one single exception. this conference report comes in $35 million below the administration request. The one area where this legislation exceeds the original administration request is in refugee funding. which was enhanced during the legislative process due to increased refugee needs that had not been anticipated at the time the request was submitted. This bill increases the authorization for refugee funding by $140 million. primarily for enhanced needs for Soviet. Kurdish. Southeast Asian. and African refugees. I would like to emphasize. however. that even this increase has been fully offset legislatively to ensure compliance with the Budget Act and to remain consistent with the overall administration request level. Those offsets were made in the foreign aid bill rather than the State Department authorization bill. This was done because refugee funding comes through the foreign aid appropriations process rather than through the CommerceJusticeState appropriation process. As the chairman has mentioned. this conference report also includes several major congressional initiatives. Among these are: A formal policy and procedure for applying sanctions to countries and firms involved in the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons.