National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 5 minutes.

I want to thank the chairman and all the staff members and members of the committee for their excellent work in pulling this bill together.

As always, I think it is a fine example of how the legislative process should work around here, and too often doesn't. We had a bill before committee. We had many, many hearings to discuss the issues around it. Then we had a long markup with amendments offered and debated, and we put together a bill in a bipartisan fashion that I think was done quite well.

I also agree with the chairman that there is a lot of good in this bill. There are a lot of efforts at reforming the way we do procurement and other things in the Department of Defense to try to get the most out of the money we spend.

More than anything, the good in this bill is that it continues to provide for the men and women of our services who are fighting for us and protecting our national security, and I think it does a very comprehensive job of that, and that is an important issue right now. I will also agree with the chairman that we face as complex a threat environment as we have probably faced, gosh, in the history of the country. We have certainly had great national security challenges throughout our history, but now they are coming at us from all directions.

Certainly, we have the asymmetric threat of terrorism from groups like al Qaeda and Daesh and all that goes with that.

We have a newly belligerent Russia that is creating problems in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. We have Iran, which continues to pose challenges to us in the Middle East and also elsewhere; North Korea, that is acting in a very belligerent manner; and China, that is expanding its territory by creating islands in the South China Sea and challenging the territorial integrity of other nations.

All of those things require us to be prepared and to have a robust national security policy. I think this bill does a good job of it.

Now, we are facing a reckoning, coming down the road here, in that all of those national security challenges that I just mentioned are going to be tough to meet under any budget.

One of the things that I would urge us to do is to work more closely with partners throughout the globe, as we have in some instances, to meet our national security challenges, because the sheer cost of them is going to be difficult. But on the whole, I think this bill does a good job of meeting our national security concerns.

There are just two problems that I do want to point out. Number one, we don't really make as many tough choices as we should make in this bill. The chairman has pointed out how this bill prioritizes readiness, and to some degree that is true; but this bill also still has $11 million less in money for readiness than the President's budget that was proposed because we support a wide range of other programs.

If you look over the course of the next 10 years at all of the programs that we are funding and planning on buying, and then you look at how much money we are likely to have, the two don't add up. We have to start making some difficult choices about what we are going to fund and what we are not going to fund.

Related to that is the second problem, the one the chairman alluded to, and that is the fact that while this budget sticks to the $610 billion number that was agreed to in the budget resolution last year, it takes $18 billion out of the overseas contingency operations fund and puts it into the base budget, which means that 6 months into the fiscal year our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere will not have the money to support those overseas operations unless a supplemental is passed.

Now, the chairman is quite correct: this was done in 2008. But in 2008, we did not have the Budget Control Act. We did not have the complete unwillingness of this Congress to lift the Budget Control Act. I don't see that changing in the next 6 months.

Which brings us to the other issue, and that is the issue of ``holding the defense bill hostage for other spending priorities, for domestic spending priorities.''

Well, that is one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at is a budget is a series of choices that you have to make. And if we do spend an additional $18 billion on defense, over and above what the budget agreement of last year agreed to, then that money has got to come from somewhere.

Either, one, it adds to a $19 trillion debt that I think most people feel is too high and that we need to eventually get to the point of a balanced budget.

It requires new revenue which, of course, is--you know, I should be struck down by lightning in this Chamber for even mentioning the words ``new revenue.'' That is, apparently, verboten and not going to happen.

However much we may claim to support the men and women who served in our Armed Forces, we are not prepared to raise taxes for what they need to do.

Then you have got the domestic choices, and those domestic choices are not irrelevant. We have a crumbling infrastructure in this country that is way behind, massively unfunded.

We have other priorities. We have the Department of Homeland Security. We have Intel priorities. All of those priorities are shoved backwards if we take an additional $18 billion for defense.

So we are not holding defense hostage. We are arguing about what our budget priorities should be.

Should we go and take the $610 billion agreement we had for defense and effectively up it to $628 billion at the expense of all these other priorities, or shouldn't we? That is what we have to balance.

I will look forward to the debate. There are a lot of interesting amendments coming up. I am not sure at this point how I am going to vote on this bill. I think it is incredibly important. We need to get it done.

But those budget priorities are very real. And if we take an extra $18 billion for defense, that does shortchange other areas, given our unwillingness to raise revenue to pay for it.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Loretta Sanchez), the ranking member of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), the ranking member of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Guam (Ms. Bordallo), the ranking member of the Readiness Subcommittee.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney), the ranking member of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper), the ranking member of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time each side has remaining?

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Davis), ranking member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I want to reiterate some of the points that were made during the debate in the beginning of how important this bill is.

We do have many national security needs. I know you see the size of the Department of Defense's budget, and there are certainly ways we can save money. I think we have done that with acquisition reform and with some of the other reforms that are contained in this bill.

It is also important to understand the threats that we face in the world--the continuing threat of terrorism and the continuing threats from nations like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. We need to be prepared to counter those threats if we are going to have a peaceful and stable world.

Nonetheless, I think we still have the budget problem that I alluded to earlier, and that is that we do not have the money that we would like to have. It is not just for defense; it is for a lot of domestic priorities as well. In the way this bill is set up, it creates the possibility that we will take an additional $18 billion for defense.

How does that balance against our other priorities?

We have to figure out how to make our budget balance and meet the priorities domestically while also meeting the national security priorities because our infrastructure is critical to our national security as well. We have to remain strong economically as a country.

In addition to that, it is not just the Department of Defense that provides for our security. There is the Department of Homeland Security, certainly, in the intelligence budget; the Department of Treasury; the Department of Justice. A lot of pieces to that puzzle are necessary, and they all get shortchanged if we don't take into account their needs as well.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield to the gentlewoman from Arizona (Ms. McSally).

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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