National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, before I go to the substance of my remarks, let me just say what I think is on the minds of millions of Americans today, whether they are progressives or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans or Independents. The United States of America is not and must never be about locking up little children in cages on the southern border. Right now, we have the opportunity, and must take advantage of that opportunity, to pass legislation to end that horrific practice.

Madam President, I want to take this moment to thank my colleagues for their very hard work on the Department of Defense authorization bill. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons which I will articulate right now, I intend to vote against it, and certainly one of those reasons is that when you have legislation that expends $716 billion-- let me repeat it--$716 billion, it is totally unacceptable that we do not have a serious debate on the floor of the Senate that amendments are not accepted to improve this legislation.

I have submitted a number of amendments, and other colleagues, I know, have done the same. I want to express my strong feelings about our Nation's bloated military budget, particularly in light of the many unmet needs we face as a nation.

A $716 billion military budget is over half of the discretionary budget in this country. The size of that budget tells me we need vigorous debate on it. We need to find where there is waste, where there is fraud, where there are cost overruns, and to simply pass that gigantic budget without scrutiny is simply not acceptable.

I have heard over and over my Republican colleagues and some of my Democratic colleagues come down to the floor to complain about a $21 trillion national debt--and they are right. That is a huge debt we are leaving to our children and our grandchildren, but I do find it interesting that I do not hear any objections to the size of this military budget, to the fact that it has been expanded by $165 billion over the next 2 years.

So what I do find is that when we talk about providing healthcare to all of our people--and doing what every other major nation on Earth that guarantees healthcare as a right and not a privilege does-- suddenly people are standing up and saying: We can't afford it. It is too expensive. But when it comes to a $716 billion military budget, which is more than the 10 next countries combined spend on defense, I do not hear a word about the size of the budget and about our deficit.

We have been told over and over that we cannot make public colleges and universities tuition-free; that we cannot lower the student debt levels that millions of people in this country carry decade after decade; that we cannot make public colleges and universities tuition- free, but somehow we can spend $716 billion on a military budget. Even though over half of older Americans have no retirement savings, we have been told we need to cut Social Security, not expand Social Security.

I think it is time to get our priorities right, and what our priorities are about is addressing the fact that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country; that we have millions of seniors in Vermont and around this country trying to get by on $11,000, $12,000, $13,000 a year in Social Security; that our infrastructure is collapsing. Maybe we ought to start addressing the issues and the needs of the working people of this country rather than just pour more and more money into the defense budget.

The time is long overdue for us to take a hard look at the enormous-- and I underline the word ``enormous''--amount of waste, the cost overruns, the fraud and the financial mismanagement that has plagued the Department of Defense for decades. That is why I have offered a bipartisan amendment, along with Senators Grassley and Lee, to end the absurdity of the Department of Defense being the only Federal agency to have not undergone an audit. I don't think it is too much to ask, when we are spending $716 billion, to have the Department of Defense give us an audit to tell the American people how that money is being spent. Tell us about the fraud. Tell us about the cost overruns.

According to a Gallup poll a few months ago, 65 percent of the American people oppose spending more money on the Department of Defense, but that is precisely what we are doing right now--not only spending more money but spending a lot more money.

As a point of comparison--and it is important we do this--the increase in military spending that is in this bill is larger than the entire budget of China. I am just talking about the increase in military spending. China spends about $150 billion a year on defense. We are going to be increasing military spending by $165 billion over a 2-year period. Russia spends about $61 billion a year on defense. This budget, again, is $716 billion.

Now, I am sure our friends in the defense contractor industry are very excited about this--they are going to be making zillions of dollars--but I am not so sure working people are excited about a budget at the same time as my Republican friends tell us we cannot afford nutrition programs for children or to expand Social Security for the elderly.

I think we all believe in a strong national defense, but we cannot continue to give the Pentagon and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin a blank check while we ignore the needs of working families.

About half of the Pentagon's $716 billion budget goes directly into the hands of private contractors, not our troops. There are troops out there who are living on food stamps. We want to address that problem, but at the same time we do not have to make the military industrial complex even wealthier than they are today.

Let us also be clear. Over the past two decades, virtually every major defense contractor in the United States has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements for misconduct and fraud, all while making huge profits on these government contracts. Since 1995, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies have paid nearly $3 billion in fines or related settlements for fraud or misconduct. That is $3 billion in payments to the government for fraud or misconduct. Yet those three companies alone received about $800 billion in defense contracts over the past 18 years.

Does anybody care that the major defense contractors in this country, time after time after time, are found guilty of fraud and various types of misconduct?

One of the amendments I have filed would simply require the Pentagon to establish a website on defense contractor fraud with a list of companies convicted of defrauding the Federal Government. I don't think that is a radical idea. The American people might want to know what companies have been found guilty of defrauding the Federal Government.

Further, I find it interesting that the very same defense contractors that have been found guilty or reached settlements for fraud are also paying their CEOs and their executives excessive and obscene compensation packages. Last year, the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, two of the top four U.S. defense contractors, were each paid over $20 million in total compensation. Moreover, more than 90 percent of the revenue of those companies came from defense spending. In other words, we have a situation where companies that get almost all of their revenue from defense contracting are paying their CEOs 100 times more than the Secretary of Defense gets, whose salary is capped at $205,000 a year. That, to me, makes no sense at all. That is why I have filed an amendment to prohibit defense contractor CEOs from making more money than the Secretary of Defense.

Moreover, as the GAO has told us, there are massive cost overruns in the Defense Department's acquisition budget that must be addressed. According to the GAO, the Pentagon's $1.66 trillion acquisition portfolio currently suffers from more than $537 billion in cost overruns, with much of the cost growth taking place after production. In other words, defense contractors say: We are going to build a weapons system for x amount of dollars, and then they simply change their mind and ask for a lot more. That is not the way you protect the taxpayers' dollars or the way you run a government. In my view, that has to change.

A major reason why there is so much waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon is the fact that the Defense Department remains the only Federal agency in America that has not been able to pass an independent audit 28 years after Congress required it to do so. Very interestingly, on September 10, 2001, 1 day before 9/11, former Secretary of Defense for George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, said:

Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in the building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.

Yet 17 years after Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's statements, DOD still has not passed a clean audit, despite the fact that the Pentagon controls assets in excess of $2.2 trillion, or roughly 70 percent of what the entire Federal Government owns.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded in 2001 that $31 billion to $60 billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan had been lost to fraud and waste. Children in America go hungry. Veterans sleep out on the street. Elderly people can't make it on $12,000 a year of Social Security, but, apparently, there is not a lot of concern that $31 billion to $60 billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan have been lost to fraud and waste.

Separately, in 2015 the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that the Pentagon could not account for $45 billion in funding for reconstruction projects. More recently, an audit conducted by Ernst & Young for the Defense Logistics Agency found that it could not properly account for some $800 million in construction projects. It is time to hold the Defense Department to the same level of accountability as the rest of the government.

I would also like to spend a minute talking about an amendment that makes a great deal of sense to me. In this bill, we are spending $716 billion in defense spending in order to protect the American people. This bill does that through the production of planes, bombs, guns, missiles, tanks, nuclear weapons, submarines, and other weapons of destruction. It is being funded in this bill.

The amendment I am proposing would reduce the Defense Department by one-tenth of 1 percent. It would use that money to make us safer by reaching out to people throughout the world in ways that bring us together through educational and cultural exchange programs. At the end of the day, we are a safer country and a safer planet when we do our best to rid the ignorance and hatred that exists all over the world. One way you do that is by finding and discovering that we have a common humanity. When children from other countries come into our classrooms and our kids sit in the classrooms of other countries, it turns out that we have a lot more in common than we have in opposition. We can reduce hatred and bigotry in that way. Dialogue cannot only take place between foreign ministers or diplomats at the United Nations. It should be taking place between people throughout the world at the grassroots level.

On a separate note, let me mention that since March 2015, the U.S. Armed Forces have been involved in hostilities between a Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis in Yemen. I believe that the time is long overdue for us to put an end to that unconstitutional and unauthorized participation in this war.

The truth about Yemen is that U.S. forces have been actively engaged in support of the Saudi coalition in this war, providing intelligence and aerial refueling of planes whose bombs have killed thousands of people and made the humanitarian crisis there even worse.

Even now, as I speak, there are reports of an attack on the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah by the Saudi-led coalition. Hodeidah is a key entry point for humanitarian aid into Yemen. The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the country, Lisa Grande, said last week:

A military attack or siege on Hodeidah will impact hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. . . . In a prolonged worst case, we fear that as many as 250,000 people may lose everything--even their lives.

The Trump administration has tried to justify our involvement in the Yemen war as necessary to push back on Iran. You will all recall that another administration told us that invading Iraq was necessary to confront al-Qaida, and another administration way back told us that the Vietnam war was necessary to contain communism. It turned out that in every instance, none of that was true.

We should have asked tougher questions then. We should be asking tougher questions now, and we should be taking our constitutional role more seriously.

The issue of going to war is not a Presidential prerogative. It is the prerogative of the U.S. Congress. We have now been in Afghanistan for nearly 17 years and in Iraq for 15 years. Our troops are now in Syria under what I believe are questionable authorities, and the administration has indicated that it may broaden that mission even more.

The time is now for Congress to reassert its constitutional role in determining when and where our country goes to war. That is why I have filed a bipartisan amendment, along with Senators Lee, Murphy, Warren, and several others, that would put an end to the U.S. refueling of Saudi-led coalition planes. This amendment will send a strong message that the United States will no longer participate in this humanitarian catastrophe.

Directly related to the conflict in Yemen is the issue of Iran. The Trump administration has repeatedly justified its support for the Saudi-Emirati war in terms of pushing back on Iran's activities.

The Trump administration has signaled in many ways that it intends to confront Iran. If anyone has any doubt, I remind them that President Trump's new National Security Advisor, John Bolton, wrote an article a few years ago that was entitled ``To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran.'' I have very serious concerns that this administration could lead the United States into another major war in the Middle East, which is the last thing that the American people want.

Let me conclude by saying this. I think everybody in the Congress believes and understands that we need a strong defense, but we do not need a defense budget that is bloated, that is wasteful, and that has in it many areas of fraud. I would hope that all of my colleagues remember what a former Republican President, Dwight David Eisenhower, said as he left office in 1961. This is what President Eisenhower said as he was leaving office:

In 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.

In an earlier speech, Eisenhower, a four-star general who led American forces in World War II--not exactly a pacifist--said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

I would ask all of my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to remember what President Eisenhower said.

2905, regarding the DOD audit; amendment No. 2657, regarding a citizen exchange program; amendment No. 2660, regarding Saudi refueling; and amendment No. 2506, regarding defense- contractor compensation.

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Mr. SANDERS. Thank you.

Madam President, I raise a point of order that the pending measure violates section 4106 of H. Con. Res. 71, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018.
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