the nonprofit Corporation for Travel Promotion (CTP) — a first-ever partnership between the travel industry and the federal government to market and promote travel and tourism in the United States.
Not even a year-and-a-half later, U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) suggested cutting the program altogether. Why? It was this past July, during the height of the debt-ceiling wars, and CTP became a target of YouCut (http://majorityleader.gov/
YouCut), a program Cantor launched on his website last year that encourages the public to cast votes on programs they’d like to see eliminated from the federal budget. If enough people vote on a particular program, it’s introduced on the chopping block in the House of Representatives.
CTP is funded by contributions from the
travel industry along with a $10 entry fee charged to international visitors from certain countries. Cantor’s office estimated that dis- solving CTP — effectively “terminating remit- tances of the visitor fees to the corporation,”