William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states: ``Congress shall have the power . . . to provide and maintain a Navy.'' The Seapower and Projection Force's Subcommittee mark in this year's 2021 NDAA rises to that constitutional duty with a coherent, workable shipbuilding plan and a Projection Force mark that ensures air and sealift forces are capable of fulfilling their mission.

It became abundantly clear when the administration sent over its 2021 budget that we were facing daunting challenges in our subcommittee's jurisdiction. Airlift and sealift were underresourced; the Navy shipbuilding budget was cut by 17 percent from last year; the request for new ships as verified by the Congressional Research Service was seven, the lowest since 2009; and the statutory requirement for the Department of Defense to submit a 30-year shipbuilding plan was, and continues to be, brazenly ignored.

Our mark corrects these hits to our shipbuilding industrial base and is aligned to the Navy's actual requested priorities that were not included in February's budget. This includes nine ships, including the first Columbia-class ballistic submarine, two Arleigh Burke destroyers, and two Virginia-class submarines, to name a few.

I want to foot-stomp that the mark reverses one of the most compounding elements of the administration's budget: the elimination of a Virginia-class submarine, which would disrupt the two-a-year build rate for the first time in a decade that Congress has diligently sustained.

We have heard Navy officials confirm that there is industrial base capacity to support a second sub in 2021, and that platform is their number one unfunded priority. Its production represents the most cost- effective way to mitigate our declining submarine fleet.

Even more importantly, we heard from combatant commands in the Pacific and Atlantic about the need to stop that decline and retain our undersea superiority as the most effective deterrent to keep the peace. We fixed that flaw in our work, and we did it underneath the bipartisan budget caps.

Mr. Speaker, all of this was accomplished with teamwork, and I want to thank my friend and colleague, Ranking Member Rob Wittman, all of the subcommittee members, and our amazing staff: Phil MacNaughton, Dave Sienicki, Kelly Goggin, and Sean Falvey. And I also want to thank Lieutenant Commander Cam Massey, our Navy fellow in our office, who was instrumental in getting this fine product.

I urge passage of the Thornberry NDAA.

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