Floor Remarks by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
“Congressional Spending Requires Aggressive Congressional Oversight”
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Iowa is home to roughly 25 different types of snakes.
Some are venomous, such as the copperhead and rattlesnakes.
However, the one snake doing the most damage to Iowans is a snake that’s not even in Iowa.
So, I’d like to introduce you to the brown treesnake.
The brown treesnake doesn’t reside in Iowa, Washington, D.C. or any other state represented within the Senate.
That snake lives in Guam.
That snake is not only damaging the native animals of Guam, it’s wreaking havoc on the American taxpayer. So, this gets to money.
The federal government’s goal, from what I’ve been told, is to eradicate the snakes. And that’s where billions of dollars come in.
Our government’s been trying to do this for the last 30 years.
On June 7, 2023, I sent a letter to the Department of Defense, the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture.
I asked those three agencies how they’ve spent taxpayer money to eradicate this snake from Guam.
After waiting five months and an additional request on August 3, I received responses from these agencies.
Alarmingly, none of the three were able to tell me how many of the snakes are thought to be on the island or the estimated timeline for eradication.
Seems to me our government ought to have better statistics that tell us what their plan is and how their goals are being met. You can see, soon, that they don’t have that information.
Let me say, it’s obvious, with all the taxpayers’ money they’re getting, they ought to at least have some sort of an estimate on this subject.
So, what did my oversight find?
We’ll start with the Department of Agriculture. That department, from Fiscal Year 2000 to right now, its budget expenditures were over $10 million.
Now, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to others.
This is what I learned from the Department of Interior. That department told me that, from Fiscal Year 1993 to now, they’ve funded over $90 million to support interdiction, suppression and eradication of the brown treesnake.
Another department, the Department of Defense, gave me this figure for those same fiscal years: it spent more than $140 million.
How many more decades and hundreds of millions of dollars do we have to spend on this snake?
And what kind of projects have the taxpayers funded related to this snake? I’ve got some examples for you.
Four projects in Fiscal Years 2009, 2010, 2014 and 2018 related to the application of Tylenol-treated baits, which are poisonous to the snake: $2.9 million.
$600,000 for multiple public awareness campaigns to educate the public on Guam [and] on how the snake affects the ecosystem, human health and other factors.
$375,000 for various research projects, including improved camera monitoring of the snake, Caged Bird colonies as “super attractors” with integrated snake trapping and studying the efficacy of self-resetting kill traps.
$122,000 for purifying and testing gecko skin compounds.
$56 million in Fiscal Year 2023 for the Brown Treesnake Barrier South Multi-Species Barrier.
Now, that last one ought to really hit home for you.
The Biden administration can’t secure the southern border.
Millions of immigrants are illegally crossing every year.
According to reports, in Fiscal Year 2023, 172 people on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List have been encountered at the border.
How many on the Terrorist Watch List are got-aways? I guess we don’t have a figure on that one. The 172 are the ones we know of.
Here, Congress and the Biden administration have no problem spending $56 million on a barrier to secure land against a snake.
This is a clear example of spending that’s out of control and why Congress must perform exacting oversight.
Sadly, this is not a new problem.
On July 22, 2004, the late senator from Arizona, John McCain, made the following remarks on this floor regarding earmarks identified in a defense appropriation bill for that year, 2004: “$1 million for the Brown Tree Snakes. Once again, the brown treesnake has slithered its way into our defense appropriation bill. I’m sure the snakes are a serious problem, but a defense appropriations act isn’t the appropriate vehicle to address this issue.”
So here I stand, almost 20 years later, identifying that this snake has continued to wreak havoc on both the island of Guam and, of course, on the American taxpayers.
I recognize that the brown treesnake is a serious issue in Guam, but it’s also become a serious problem robbing the American taxpayer, taking millions out of their billfolds without really any plan I’ve been able to discover that the government knows how they’re going to spend the taxpayers’ money to eradicate the brown treesnake.
Congressional appropriations of taxpayer money will be subject to waste, fraud and abuse without congressional oversight.
Accordingly, that’s exactly what’s needed here to better determine if taxpayer money has been used as it should’ve, and whether these spending levels are needed at all.
I yield the floor.
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