Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, I do not support the war on coal that is waged by this administration and my friends on the left, but I do support the war on waste, and I support this amendment based upon that fiscal imperative.

Now we are told our defense budget is so stretched that we now have to scavenge museums for aircraft parts. Yet there appears to be plenty of money to squander in a corrupt earmark that dates back to 1961.

As has been pointed out, that earmark requires that one American Air Force base in Kaiserslautern, Germany, has to purchase 9,000 tons of coal a year at a grossly inflated price, plus the cost of transporting this overpriced coal across the Atlantic Ocean and halfway across the European Continent.

The latest excuse we just heard is, well, otherwise we have to buy coal from Russia. Well, why in the world would we want to do that?

One company in Poland produces 48 million tons of coal from 23 mines. It produces more coal in an hour than this base uses in a year. And the objection seems particularly ludicrous, considering that the NDAA authorizes hundreds of millions of dollars for rocket engines purchased from Russia.

The Pentagon and successive Presidents have consistently protested this waste, but these protests have fallen on deaf ears in Congress, even while we are told that our defense spending has been cut to the bone.

If we don't change the spending trajectory of this government, the Congressional Budget Office warns that, in 6 years, interest on the national debt will exceed what we spent this year for our defense. That makes rooting out waste like this a national defense imperative.

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