Thwarting Government Waste and Reprioritizing American Taxpayer Dollars

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss the concerning $125 billion in bureaucratic waste brought to light by the Washington Post this week.

This article came on the heels of two major votes last week in the House of Representatives: an additional $4.8 billion in funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the authorization of $611.2 billion for the Department of Defense. Considering these measures back- to-back leads me to put them in context with each other.

On the one hand, Congress has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to fund a military that is larger than the next seven country's combined, including China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan. On the other hand, we are providing a helpful, but relatively minute, sum of money to increase lifesaving medical research, educate our nation's youth, and support our first responders.

To then discover that the Pentagon has identified at least $125 billion in waste further underscores our nation's misguided priorities. If just ten percent of the self-identified waste were redirected to the NIH, new cures could be found and lives could be saved. In this year's Defense Authorization, $1.5 billion is spent to upgrade an aircraft carrier that the U.S. Navy had asked to retire. Why not reprioritize that money to improve veterans' healthcare or expand access to education?

This gratuitous spending must stop. The American taxpayer deserves to know that their hard-earned dollars are going toward promoting American values and being reinvested in their wellbeing. It's not just the programs that I highlight that deserve a higher priority--it's Medicare and Medicaid, it's Social Security, it's social safety net programs-- the list goes on and on. Until we press the Pentagon to undergo a rigorous audit, I cannot and will not support bloated spending at the Defense Department. The American people deserve more transparency and accountability.

Dwight D. Eisenhower shared my fears and concerns. Our 34th President, a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II, and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe once said, ``[I]n the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.''

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