Rick Perry Sought Federal Funds As Governor Despite Attacking Spending On The Campaign Trail
By WILL WEISSERT
11/14/11
AUSTIN, Texas -- Rick Perry, who bashes federal spending everywhere he goes on the presidential campaign trail, has spent 11 years as Texas' governor asking Washington for money.
Perry sought and received $24.2 billion in stimulus funding for Texas while saying the program was bad federal policy. He helped secure more than $100 million to protect against drug violence and illegal immigration on the Mexican border. The governor also endorsed his state's request for money under President Barack Obama's new health care law, though he now promises to help repeal the measure should he win the White House.
Most of all, Perry asked for emergency federal aid for victims of wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, flooding and crop-killing heat waves and freezes in his state's 254 counties. Texans hit by natural disasters "deserve a more immediate, compassionate response from their federal government," Perry wrote in a November 2009 letter complaining that the Housing and Urban Development Department was slow in aiding hurricane victims.
That's a far cry from today's Perry, who has promised to make the federal government as inconsequential in peoples' lives as possible.
"I'm going to show up in Washington, D.C., with a sledgehammer, and they're not going to like it," he said during a recent campaign swing in Iowa.
Perry made 1,180 requests for federal aid since 2001, according to an Associated Press analysis of documents obtained through a state Open Records Act request. That means the governor sent letters seeking money from Washington at a rate of about one every four days...
For the full article, go to:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/14/rick-perry-2012-federal-spending_n_1092105.html?ref=politics
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