Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Chairman, when the House adopted and the President signed the most recent tax cuts, at a time when we are at war and in deficit, we knew the other shoe had to drop soon. And it has, Mr. Speaker, with a great thud, in the form of this year's Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2004 (H.R. 2660). The House Leadership has followed the passage of these irresponsible tax cuts with an appropriations bill which underfunds a host of important programs and initiatives while breaking many of the pledges the Leadership made when the House adopted the FY04 Budget Resolution.
We cannot extol the virtues of programs like Head Start and organizations like National Institutes of Health while adopting legislation which threatens their very existence. These actions abandon this Congress' responsibility to provide resources necessary to improve schools, protect public health, provide for America's seniors and disabled, expand opportunities to higher education, and seek cures for diseases that threaten the health of all Americans.
Mr. Speaker, we are starving our nation's most valuable programs. Last year alone, Head Start provided over 900,000 children with comprehensive early childhood education. But it is estimated that current funding levels leave behind over 40 percent of eligible children. This year I joined with Representative Loretta Sanchez in spearheading a letter signed by ninety of our House Colleagues calling on the House Appropriations Committee to increase funding to the Head Start Program by $1 billion which would result in the enrollment of 87,000 additional children.
I remind you, Mr. Chairman, that Head Start is an extremely popular and effective program. In a 1999 study released by the President's Management Council indexing public support for and belief in government programs, Head Start rated a 94 percent, tops among all government programs. Moreover, studies have shown that the economic benefits of Head Start far exceed their costs, with one study showing that for every $1 spent by taxpayers, they received $7 in future benefits.
Yet, in the face of this data, with the passage of this legislation, we will close the door of the Head Start program to tens of thousands of deserving children and their families. This substandard funding increase means we will continue to leave nearly 40 percent of eligible children behind and severely undermine local Head Start organization' ability to provide training and technical assistance to teachers and parents.
But this bill will not only leave Head Start children behind. It will also shatter the promises Congress made to America's school children when it adopted the No Child Left Behind Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This legislation falls $8 billion short of fully funding No Child Left Behind and continues this Congress' deplorable record of underfunding IDEA.
Students seeking higher education fair no better under this bill. In 1975, when the Pell Grant program was instituted, it financed approximately 84 percent of the cost of attending a 4-year public college. Today, that number is down to 40 percent. Under this bill that number will drop to approximately 38 percent. In my own Southern California district, higher education costs have increased with California's growing budget deficit forcing public universities to substantially raise tuition costs. This same scenario is being played our across our nation and a continued shortage of grant assistance threatens the higher education aspirations of millions of young people.
By adopting this legislation we will effectively shift a greater burden of college costs to students and working families and will undoubtedly ensure that too many of our children either leave college with overwhelming debt or are shut out of higher education all together.
But state budget crises do not only affect education costs, they also endanger the health care safety net which millions of Americans have come to depend on for needed health care services. And yet, under this legislation, struggling community health centers, which provide primary care services to low-income Americans, find no relief.
In Los Angeles County alone, over 30 community clinics have been forced to shut their doors. Under this legislation these clinics and those that find themselves on the brink of closure will be provided no relief because any funding appropriated to community health centers will be used to expand health center sites where they have not existed in the past. At this bill's funding level, the lowest since 1998, we are forced to choose between scaling back our expansion initiative or underfunding existing centers. This is simply an untenable solution to a growing health care crisis that affects low-income Americans.
Finally, H.R. 2660 abandons this Congress' commitment to double the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget thereby stifling improvements in science and medical research. This legislation increase NIH funding by 2.5 percent, an increase that according to NIH is not even enough to keep up with inflation in research costs. In comparison, over the last five years, Congress has adopted annual increase of 15 percent.
A funding increase which only allows NIH to introduce 21 additional research grants will not allow this agency to continue to provide our nation with the cutting edge research which we have come to expect.
Mr. Chairman, this legislation is inadequate. I urge my colleagues to oppose it and work to adopt legislation which adequately funds America's priorities.