The Food Bank serves over 500 local food assistance providers in an eleven county area of southwestern Pennsylvania. A recent study, Hunger in America 2001, found that over 300,000 different individuals are served annually in this region over one year’s time. 29% of client households have at least one adult working. 33% are children .

The growth in services by the food bank to ever more people in need over our 22-year history seems to parallel the declining responsibility taken by the federal government for ensuring the common good of its people. Public safety net policies have not kept pace with the cost of living and cause more and more residents to seek help through private sector programs such as local pantries and soup kitchens.

One positive elements of President Bush’s proposed budget is the reinstatement of food stamp benefits for legal immigrants who have been in the U.S. for a minimum of five years. Yet the minimum benefit level is still $10, unchanged since the late 1970’s. This failure of public policy on the federal level to keep pace with real life expenses has placed undue burdens on state governments concerned with the basic human needs of residents. States now face budget deficits and are calling for cuts in their human service programs. Here in Pennsylvania, Governor Schweiker has proposed cuts of $500,000 to the State Food Purchase Program and $500,000 to the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program for seniors.

I urge that we adequately fund reauthorization of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) with poverty reduction as a goal. Caseload declines should not be the main focus. Assistance cuts from the public arena is often displaced to the private sector. Food Banks and our network of food pantries and soup kitchens are not prepared and lack the resources to replace the needed public sector safety net.

Fund the Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC). While research has demonstrated its cost effectiveness it is still not an entitlement program. If we are truly to leave no child behind, we need to make WIC an entitlement and set in place a more realistic formula for its funding and administration.

Provide a greater incentive for the food industry to donate food for those in need to strengthen pri- vate sector food assistance. The CARE Act, S. 1924,

would increase aid from local family farms, small businesses and restaurants who make in-kind food donations; new tax incentives make donations financially viable - a win-win for all parties. USDA estimates that 96 billion pounds of edible food are wasted and dumped in landfills each year. The Good Samaritan Hunger Relief Tax Incentive Act, part of the Care Act, would, if even 1% of that food were re-directed from landfills to local charities, nearly double the entire distribution of America’s Second Harvest network to people in need.

The Farmers Market Nutrition Program helps women and children (WIC recipients) and senior citizens buy fresh, nutritious, local food at the local farmers markets. It not only does FMNP help low-income folks feed their families. It also helps keep small farmers in business. Hundreds of farms — mostly small ones, many in the Pittsburgh region — close down in the U.S. every year, because of urban sprawl and poor planning. This puts people out of jobs, destroys family businesses which have been around for generations, and denies fresh fruits and vegetables to residents. In the farm bill that just passed we won some victories in the food stamp arena, but subsidies to large farmers were again increased.

FMNP is partly funded by the state. But Bush wants to cut out the federal program. In Pittsburgh last year, over 4,000 low income seniors participated in FMNP — they each got $20 to spend at the local farmers markets. And they loved it!

We want this program to become a permanent part of the federal budget. It’s much more useful to people than useless weapons systems which feed only the pentagon. Also, what ever happened to the Annual Report the city was supposed to issue every year, detailing the effects of military spending on city residents? This report was a city charter amendment passed by voters’ referendum years ago. But since Murphy came in, this charter provision has been violated. I think it would enlighten the public to know where their money goes.

To conclude, we need to continually ask — where are our priorities? Why are we denying basic food to our young families and seniors, while the Pentagon gets fatter and fatter? Can you help us on this?

There is a proposed looming cut of millions from the CDBG funds. . .which provide low-cost goods to the countless emergency food banks in the Greater Pittsburgh area.

Who is in need of these services? Here are a few profiles of people who frequent the food banks. Since 1997 many mothers on welfare have found employment. By all accounts at least 50% have left the welfare rolls. They tend to go into the 70% of jobs with the most growth in Pennsylvania, namely, waiters, waitresses, cashiers, and aides in nursing homes and personal care homes. They also go into the retail market.

Very few of these jobs pay $13,000 a year, typically with no benefits. When the crunch of rent, utilities, childcare (which can amount to $400 a month without subsidies) and transportation to their jobs hits them, they turn to the food banks.

Senior citizens (are) overburdened by doctor visits, hospitalization insurance and ever-rising prescription drugs. Add 3 or 4 grandchildren for an extended summer stay while mom is employed.

Now add the chronic food bank users: the physically and mentally disabled, substance abusers, or with barriers that prevent them from working. Any cut in CBDG funds would devastate recipients.

The President’s budget does not address the needs of older and disabled Americans adequately in several important programs, especially health care and Social Security.

The decisions made today on the use of any general revenue surplus are critical to the future of Social Security, Medicare and the fate of American seniors and will impact negatively on our community economically. Many cannot afford their prescription drugs and resort to cutting their pills in half or taking an arduous bus trip to buy (them) in Canada at a greatly reduced price.

We consider Social Security to be a fundamentally sound institution and see no need for a dramatic overhaul to make it viable for the 21st century. Social Security’s projected shortfall after 2038 can be corrected with responsible changes in revenue sources.

Drastic changes, such as diverting payroll taxes to personal retirement accounts, would unnecessarily risk Social Security and erode the very qualities that mark its success.

We can increase our revenue sources in the long run if we transfer interest savings from any future debt reduction to Social Security. These savings would not exist were it not for Social Security’s reserve being credited to the national debt. We can think of no better way to use these savings than to preserve an institution in which nearly every American participates and on which nearly every American depends.

The very mathematics of the President’s budget that adopts the recommendation of the hand-picked Commission on Social Security would reduce the solvency of the Trust Fund and put current and future beneficiaries at risk. We dare not Enronize our Social Security Fund. Current benefits are guaranteed by law and protected against inflation.

We also urge the Administration to revisit the $1.6 trillion tax reduction enacted last year. We do not support accelerating phased in tax cuts or any new corporate or upper income tax bracket reductions that would worsen the long term budget picture. Nor do we support .tax provisions scheduled to sunset within ten years being made permanent.

"The federal commitment to affordable housing has been cut in half since the 1970s and since the early 1980s there have been no new federal dollars targeted to the production of additional affordable housing for households with very low incomes — in Pittsburgh that would be $14,000 or below. At the same time, State-supported spending for affordable housing has been cut in half since the early 1990s. This means that the City of Pittsburgh is working with 50% of the funds it had available in the past to develop, maintain and rehabilitate affordable housing and build strong communities

The federal budget proposed by President Bush only continues this policy of neglect of Pittsburgh and other urban neighborhoods of the past generation. Specifically, this budget cuts $286 million from Community Development Block Grants for localities like Pittsburgh which uses these funds for neighborhood infrastructure and facilities as well as housing.

It cuts $417 million from the public housing operations so that Pittsburgh’s 5,000 + viable housing units and households will suffer additional neglect. There are zero funds available to preserve or revitalize HUD multifamily/ Section 8 units which provide housing for over 6,000 City households.

All of this translates into continued poor housing conditions and quality of life for the residents of Pittsburgh’s struggling neighborhoods.

The Leave No Child Behind Act of 2001 does not provide an increase in funding for programs that deal with poverty, health, child care and Head Start.

With $400 billion being sought for the annual military budget, it seems that we don’t lack money but we do have the wrong priorities!

Up until a month ago, we had close to 2,000 eligible children on waiting lists for child care in the state of Pennsylvania, 500 of them in Allegheny County. Over a third of our child care settings are less than adequate. Accessibility to quality child care and preschool is still a distant dream for many working poor families. Babies less than six weeks old are left with care givers and in many cases for 40 hours a week.

This budget sends a clear message: Our children can be taken care of by just any one or left home alone. I urge you to send a strong message to Congress. Let them know the Pittsburgh City Council will speak for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

Public schools are one of the last places where we might truly live out the meaning of democracy; they open the door to all children with no exceptions and for that reason we must make wise collective choices, not just individual consumer choices.

49 million children attend public schools across this nation, 1.8 million children in Pennsylvania. 90% of all school age children are taught in public schools. Because of how important public education is for the well being and future of our country it is disturbing to me that the administration has decided to focus on how to achieve academic excellence without much consideration to the issue of equity. There has to be a balance; you can’t have one without the other. Children are now denied a quality education based on zip code, race, parents’ income, speaking English as a second language or having disabilities. If they are to be given a fair chance equity must be addressed now in a serious and deliberate way.

No Child Left Behind, signed into law by President Bush, is the most sweeping public education mandate since the 1983 A Nation at Risk set into motion the movement for tougher standards and standardized tests. It picks up on rewards and punishments for schools but it does not address increasing funding for programs that deal with poverty, health, child care and head start. These programs would go a long way towards providing for the overall well being of children necessary for them to participate successfully in any learning environment.

A comprehensive bill with a solid action agenda is The Act To Leave No Child Behind,* SB-940/ HR-1990, designed to deliver children from poverty, violence, abuse, neglect and poor education, it was introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd, Rep. George Miller and the Children’s Defense Fund. We call on all of you to support this bill.

We must learn how the local connects to the county, the state and national, and international. But, in a city where it is sometimes difficult for us to look beyond our own neighborhoods this may be a hard lesson to learn but a necessary one if we are to be good advocates for our children.

*unlike Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act

I am a mother of three. I wanted to get off welfare and go to school but I was told by a social worker that this was a waste of my time and I could get good work as a housekeeper at a hotel instead. But I was determined to get an education. Now I am one year away from obtaining a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work. I couldn’t have managed without the assistance of government programs to help feed and clothe my children.

Under the proposed budget other women will not receive the same opportunity as I have.

$300 million would be cut from the EPA budget.. The $176 million supplemental Emergency Response Fund would be cut completely. Mr. Bush plans to: shift $83 million out of the ongoing Superfund program; reduce water quality programs by $524 million; reduce the Clean Water State Revolving Fund by $138 million or 10 % from $1.35 billion. [This fund is of special interest to Pittsburgh; it provides loans to modernize and upgrade aging sewer and water treatment systems.]

He’d also fund the new program to help communities comply with new arsenic standards out of the Maintain the Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Fund instead of adding $27 million in new funding.

On the backbone of federal enforcement, civil enforcement, compliance monitoring and incentives, Mr. Bush would cut these key programs from $165 million to $161 million, cutting deeply into the enforcement workforce. EPA stands to lose as many as 200 staff positions.

Mr. Bush would boost the Department of Energy’s budget $582 million, from $21.3 billion to $21.9 billion. However, he’d cut some investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy, which should be at the center of any plan to meet our real energy needs. For example, he’d cut energy efficiency R&D by $52 million, or 8% and transportation sector technology R&D by $34 million dollars, while proclaiming the importance of reducing oil consumption for passenger vehicles. To its credit, the administration proposes a modest increase of 5.7 % for federal renewable energy R&D.

Department of the Interior funding would be re-distributed from natural resource conservation and restoration to resource exploitation and extraction. Two years ago with broad bipartisan support, Congress created a new conservation trust fund to use for a variety of purposes: urban and historic preservation, urban parks, and helping states preserve forests and wetlands, etc. Mr. Bush would divert $250 million from this new conservation trust fund to other purposes.

To summarize the impact of the administration’s budget on Pittsburgh, we should be concerned about the effect on EPA enforcement, the upgrade of sewage and water treatment plants, the clean-up of industrial sites, on improving energy efficiency, and improving our urban parks.

Add to this a $500 million funding cut for the Department of Transportation air pollution reduction programs.

The Bush/Cheney Energy Plan provides for actual dollars to subsidize mature, polluting and unsafe technologies (nuclear, coal and oil), and only a "review" of the need for funding for renewable energy and energy-efficiency technologies; more energy deregulation and a rebirth of nuclear power.

This approach will result in more Enron’s and energy price gouging; more air pollution; more nuke plant emissions and accidents (e.g. Davis Besse); and more terrorism as a result of a foreign policy that protects our dependence on foreign oil.

This is particularly counterproductive at a time when renewable energy sources are now price competitive. The old line that these technologies cannot meet our energy needs now simply is not true.

We are in the midst of an international ideological struggle between those seeking unbridled capitalism (the "free market") v. those calling for public control over vital necessities like energy. The impact of this fight effects every person on earth. Yet it is difficult for the average citizen to make the connections, especially with a complicit media. This makes the challenge even greater to educate people to be able to apply the pressure necessary to change national priorities.

I recognize that it is not easy for local elected officials to address national issues with so many local concerns on their agenda. However, it is critical that our local leaders help to educate their constituents on how national spending priorities and policies drain resources that could otherwise be used to fund basic human needs and bring about a historic change in U.S. energy use.

PSR is concerned about the concentration of the present administration on an ever expanding military superiority-at the expense of pressing international and domestic needs.

President Bush is asking Congress for almost $400 billion to expand the war on terrorism and to create a global U.S. military that can dominate in any future conflict, a $46 billion increase over last year. This $400 billion represents about three times the combined military budgets of all potential U.S. military adversaries. That is, Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. (Center for Defense Information)

The Post-Gazette recently editorialized that Bush has presented a "bloated and unbalanced proposal that would deepen future budget deficits and distort national priorities." And that this "squanders money needed for compelling domestic priorities, like protecting Social Security and Medicare and expanding health coverage for the uninsured."

I served as Chief of Infectious Disease service at Children’s Hospital for 35 years. Until this year the government provided money for immunization against important infectious diseases. For the first time, there is insufficient funding to cover the increased cost of the flu vaccine that is given free in many churches, senior centers, and other neighborhood facilities. I am concerned that in the future other vaccines will no longer be provided free to families who can’t afford them.

Nothing in the proposed budget presents such an egregious contradiction between putative goals of human security and the real threat to human well-being and survival as is posed by planned funding and development of our nuclear programs.

Ten years after the end of the Cold War, and with no credible nuclear enemy, the budget is designed to target new countries, including non-nuclear ones, to prepare for first-use and nuclear war fighting. We’d keep thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert and .maintain our huge overkill, equivalent to 100,000 Hiroshima bombs in destructive power.

Military experts, such as General Lee Butler, former commander of all US nuclear forces, assert that nuclear weapons are militarily useless; that continued dependence on them promotes nuclear proliferation, endangers accidental or deliberate use of them; and so they should be totally abolished.

City Council of Pittsburgh has had the wisdom and courage to call for a nuclear test ban, de-alerting nuclear weapons and their total elimination by an enforceable international treaty.

Proposed expenditures for nuclear weapons-related programs total $34 billion.

The so-called "star wars" BMD program, costing $120 billion to date, with no workable system, would get an annual increase from $5 to $8 billion. There is no credible enemy, it is considered unworkable by leading scientists; it will not protect against most likely threats including terrorism; will violate the ABM Treaty which was ratified by 88-2 in the Senate, and will promote a new nuclear arms race.

In addition to $20 billion to DOD for operations and deployment, $6 billion would go to DOE for so-called stockpile maintenance. That is one and a half times greater than the average annual expenditure in the entire Cold War. Besides necessary maintenance functions, these dollars would upgrade proven nuclear weapons, develop new ones, and prepare for resumption of nuclear test explosions, banned since 1992.

The programs directly threaten human security and divert resources required to meet major unmet

needs. It is a shameful fact that this richest nation in the world has many people who lack adequate food, housing or health care. A growing number of people, now 45 million, 1.3 million in Pennsylvania, lack health insurance, limiting access to health care. Reducing and then eliminating nuclear weapons and their costs could help make our people much safer and much healthier.

Public transit in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County is facing a serious funding crisis. Very shortly Port Authority Transit will initiate cuts in service and implement fare hikes because of cuts in State funding for day to day transit operations. Service cuts begin on June 16 and we have been warned that in the fall more drastic cuts in service and a fare hike will be initiated.

These cuts will of course adversely affect the overall economic life of the city. They will worsen our air quality and contribute to traffic congestion. The public transit cuts coupled with the fare hike will present yet another hardship on the poor of our city. They will undermine the overall quality of life for everybody.

The federal government does not subsidize the operating cost for public transit that serves areas with over 200,000 people. The federal government does, however, provide funds for capital projects, for example. , $312 million dollars to extend the "T" to the North Shore.

You can bet that the irony will not be lost to the public as bus routes disappear at the very time the "T" is extended. Light rail is only as good as the bus routes that feed it.

We need federal dollars to help keep the buses running. One F-16 fighter jet costs $40 million. PAT needs a $10 million net increase over the state subsidy for this next fiscal year. So, I beg the Pentagon for one fourth of an F-16 to keep our buses and trolleys running and prevent a fare hike as well.

The military black budget is perhaps the most difficult element of the federal budget to analyze, because it is shrouded in layers of secrecy. There is no public record of the purposes of the classified programs’ purposes or how they operate. And the amount of money allocated to the black budget is itself secret.

Analysts estimate that annual black budget spending comes to approximately $30 billion.

Consider the Precision Guided Re-Entry Vehicle; a product of the Cold War, it costs $8 million a day, over half of the entire federal budget for education. Congress cancelled it in 1974. The very next day, the same program was renamed the Maneuvering Re-Entry Vehicle program, and funding continued at a deeper level of the black budget.

Secret Pentagon spending increased some 1400% in the first year of the Reagan presidency. Much of it went to fund programs such as MILSTAR, a system designed to fight and win a protracted nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

As time passed, secret spending techniques became tools available for the military .to dodge congressional oversight and avoid democratic accountability.

In 1988, knowing that "public discussion of the dangers of nuclear powered rockets would create difficult political and public relations problems," Pentagon officials hid the TIMBERWIND program in the black budget.

Secret funding for these programs makes prudent evaluationdifficult, and informed public debate about them almost impossible, (creating) a fundamentally distorted decision-making process about spending priorities.

New York Times journalist Tim Weiner concludes: "The nuclear war technologies still hidden in the black budget must be brought into the light. Once seen for what they are, perhaps some can be abandoned, and the proceeds converted to human needs."

Pennsylvania’s TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) program continues to emphasize work, in any job, over family and self development through education, training and supportive services. Because Pennsylvania gets a "caseload reduction" credit based on the number of people whom they move off the welfare rolls and into the workforce, their strategy is to deny assistance for those engaged in education and job training.

Although we’ve developed a number of good working relationships over the years with some of the hardworking Department of Public Welfare staff, we’ve been mostly a thorn in their side. Until President Bush unveiled his proposal for the reauthorization of the welfare reform law.

Now, oddly enough, we are now allied with our usual adversaries in our opposition to Bush’s plan. In fact, the National Governor’s Association, the American Public Human Services Association and moderates in both Houses of Congress all agree that Bush’s proposal will be a major setback for welfare policy and will be virtually impossible for the states to achieve.

The administration’s plan creates massive new work requirements for states and parents, but provides not a single new red cent for childcare, transportation, job training or other services. In fact, massive cuts to job training programs are proposed. Nor does it provide for inflation adjustment over the next five years, cutting its real value in Fiscal Year 2007 by 22 percent.

To put this in a local perspective, as of January of this year, there were 8,574 TANF families in Allegheny County. Of that number, 4,734 adults were required to meet an already rigid work requirement. Under Bush’s proposal, over 6,000 of those 8,574 parents would have to be working 40 hours a week-or Pennsylvania will be penalized for not meeting the federal work requirements. It will be the responsibility of the state and local governments to create jobs for these struggling parents.