Bush tries to raid salmon disaster funds

The Bush administration proposes to pay for mess it created in the Census Bureau by taking funds designed to help salmon fishermen hurt by its water policies, reports Truthout.

The Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Monday, June 9, sent a proposal to Congress to amend the president’s budget and take back $70 million of the $180 million West Coast representatives had put into the farm bill for disaster assistance for fishermen devastated by fishing closures off California and Oregon and in Central Valley rivers.

West Coast Democrats reacted to the proposal by sending an angry letter to President Bush. They called "unconscionable" his proposal to deny the disaster funding to fishermen and use it to pay for a failed contract with the Harris Corporation. Harris, assigned to do the 2010 Census, was forced due to serious mismanagement to abandon its plans for using handheld computers to conduct the census and will have to conduct a costly paper census.

"This proposal is especially egregious when you consider that your administration’s water policies on all of the Pacific Northwest’s major salmon rivers are the reason this disaster funding is needed in the first place," the letter said.