Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, we have a problem in our Air National Guard right now.

This body knows full well where I have been on vaccine mandates coming down from the President. I have adamantly opposed the vaccine mandates on private-sector employees, which I find absurd that the President is announcing to every company with 100 people or more: I am going to take over the contracts for employment in your company; and no matter how long that employee has been there and how valuable they are to the company, you need to fire them if they don't follow the vaccine mandate.

That is not the right of a President. It has formed chaos in our Federal workers. It has formed chaos in our contractors for Federal employees.

Now, let me tell you what is happening in the National Guard right now. Tuesday of this week, November 30, the Secretary of Defense sent out a letter saying that, by today, December 2, every person in the National Guard had to be vaccinated or they would no longer be paid.

Now, that applied to the Air National Guard as of today; but to the Army National Guard, that doesn't apply until June 30. Let me run this past this body again. If you are in the Air National Guard and you are not vaccinated by today, you won't be paid anymore. You also can't show up at drill this weekend. You can't go into any training at all, as of this weekend. But if you are in the Army National Guard, you have until June 30 to be able to fulfill this mandate.

Now, I have been clear I am adamantly opposed to the mandate, period. But to then make it unequal between the Air National Guard and the Army National Guard is even worse.

And on top of all of that, what the administration did as of this week--they sent out information for the Air National Guard members and, I assume, for the Army National Guard starting in June that this is going to be a different process.

Title 32 is the authority for the National Guard. Now, for folks who aren't following this or the folks in this body who do, some people get confused between the Reserves and the Guard. They are not the same. The Reserves are like Active Duty. The Guard actually work for the Governor of each State.

Each State has accountability for the Guard members, and there is a responsibility to make sure they are trained and ready and equipped for Federal service if they are called up for Federal service. But when they are under what is called title 32 authority, they work for the Governor of the State. If a unit is not prepared, the State is punished for their lack of preparation. So funds can be taken away from the State but not going down to individual members of the Guard.

What did the Pentagon do this week?

The Pentagon, this week, announced that not only are they not going to pay individual members, but they are literally reaching down into a unit, identifying members that have not received the vaccine, and they are not going to pay that person.

There is no authority in law for the Pentagon to do that. In fact, that issue was debated in this body several years ago, and this body voted no on that. The Pentagon does not have the authority to reach into the Governor's National Guard and determine who will be paid and who will not be paid in the National Guard, but that is exactly what the President is trying to do and what the Pentagon is trying to do.

Why is this a big issue?

Because the Air National Guard, as of tomorrow, that are not vaccinated will not be paid, and this weekend they cannot go to drill.

Why is that a big issue?

Many of the folks in the Air National Guard that are not vaccinated are the pilots.

Listen, if we are going to talk about military readiness, I understand the differences of opinion here in the vaccine mandates. And some people have no issue with the vaccine mandates. I do. But we should all agree on military readiness. We should all agree on following the law and not allowing the Pentagon and the President to deliberately violate the law that we wrote and the President has signed in violating title 32.

Last night, I was on this very same floor, at this very same desk, asking for amendment on the NDAA. Today, I understand I am not getting that amendment on the NDAA. I have taken that same amendment and I have moved it into language that we can use as a standalone bill.

This is a very simple, straightforward, no issues, no ancillary anything on the bill. It simply says that we cannot allow the administration or the Pentagon--any one of them--to violate the law, to be able to reach into a National Guard unit and identify individual members and not pay them.

That is already the law. We are just affirming the law that already is.

And the second thing is not allowing them to be able to cut off pay based on their vaccination status in the National Guard when they are in title 32 status. That means they are working for the Governor of that State; they have not been activated to Federal duty.

This is a big issue, and it is a big issue right now because the Air National Guard members and many of our pilots are about to stop training right now. And in the days ahead for the Army National Guard, I remind this body of a number that most of us know. Only 40 percent of our Guard members are vaccinated, meaning 60 percent are not.

Are we really ready to lose that much readiness over this issue?

I would hope not.

174, S. 3299. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I look forward to working with Senator Reed on this. He has been a good partner dealing with this. He is passionate about protecting our military and keeping our forces ready.

I very much appreciate his partnership in that, and I look forward to our ongoing dialogue on this. I have had multiple phone calls to leadership in the Pentagon and leadership in the National Guard. I am not getting clear answers on this.

As I have tried to be an advocate for the members of our Air National Guard, I want to be able to make sure that we provide them that opportunity to be able to serve and that we don't lose access to readiness. So I very much appreciate his partnership in that. Government Funding

Mr. President, it is my understanding that in a short period of time we will be voting on the continuing resolution.

The continuing resolution has now been passed in the House. It has been delivered over to the Senate. This maintains our government operations for the next 2 months.

I have been a person who has expressed my frustration that we have not taken up the vast majority of the appropriations bills, even in committee. It is my understanding that even as of today, 9 of the 12 appropriations bills have not even been discussed in committee, and all 12 of those bills should have been done by September 30. We are now well past that now.

On September 30, we passed a continuing resolution that went until tomorrow. Now we are passing another one that is going to go into February. As I read through it, as it just came over from the House of Representatives, and was scanning quickly through it when they actually released the language in it this morning, I was interested to be able to see a couple of things that popped out to me in particular, serving on the Homeland Security Committee. Serving that position in Homeland Security and some of the issues that we deal with on a day-to-day basis on oversight, I was fascinated to see two particular areas that popped out to me in this. One of them was dealing with unaccompanied minors.

The administration earlier this year took some of the COVID money that had been allocated in March and used that COVID money to deal with unaccompanied minors. We have yet to get a full accounting of how much that was. But then when the continuing resolution was passed just September 30, 2.5 billion with a ``b''--2.5 billion additional dollars were allocated just to deal with the surge of unaccompanied minors for this year.

Well, that was a few months ago now. This continuing resolution is allocating another $1.5 billion to unaccompanied minors. So they took we don't know how much money of the COVID money for unaccompanied minors, and then if this bill passes tonight, which I assume it will at this point, it is another $4 billion just on the unaccompanied minors. Let me remind you how large of a figure that is, an additional $4 billion.

Before we lose track of that, what jumped out at me first when I went through this was a surprising number. In the continuing resolution that just came over from the House just minutes ago, there is a request for an additional $7 billion for Afghan refugees. When you say ``OK, I understand,'' in the September 30 continuing resolution, there was $6 billion for Afghan refugees over there. That is $13 billion for Afghan refugees. The best that we can tell, we have 69,000 Afghan refugees who are in the process, and we are allocating $13 billion for it.

Now, we all thought--and we had the conversation here--that $6 billion that was allocated was an enormous amount of money that was allocated, but now, 3 months after the refugees started being able to move out of Afghanistan in that debacle of a withdrawal that happened, now we are talking about not $6 billion but $13 billion. That is around $200,000 per person so far.

If that was not bad enough, in the continuing resolution done September 30, because of the enormous size of this amount of money and because of how little information has actually come to this body, there was a demand in it that by November 30--that was 2 days ago--the Department of Homeland Security would have to turn over a report of actually what is happening with the Afghan refugees. Has anyone in this body read that report from DHS now on how they are handling the Afghan refugees? I would go ahead and preemptively answer no because none of us have seen the report yet.

Here is what we don't know but yet this body demanded in the last CR to be able to get from DHS. We demanded to know crazy things like this: the number of lawful U.S. permanent residents who were evacuated out of Afghanistan. We don't have that number yet. We don't know how many were special immigrant visa holders. We don't know how many were actually applicants for special immigrant visas. We don't know the number that had any other immigrant status. We don't know the number who actually worked for our government who were actually evacuated. We have not been told although we demanded to have it by November 30.

We don't know the number of people who work for a partner government or any other entity that we were affiliated with although we asked for that. We don't know the number of people who actually came through the process and then were later determined to be security threats to the United States and had slipped through the process. We asked for that. We asked for that to come in by November 30. That has not been turned over.

We asked for the number of people who were getting paroled and their parole was then terminated because of some other criminal activity or something else. We asked for that. That is a number they have. They have not turned that number over.

We asked for even the number of interviews that had been conducted. We have yet to receive that. In fact, there has not been a single public hearing in the Senate on Afghan refugees--not one. So not only have we not received anything in writing, we have not even received any testimony from anyone from DHS on this.

Listen, we gave DHS $6 billion and said: We are going to allocate this money to you. We just want to know who we are allocating it to and what it is going to be used for.

That doesn't seem unreasonable. But not only is this body not holding DHS accountable for not answering our questions, we are handing them $7 billion more tonight. Does anyone else see this as an issue?

I am all for keeping the government open, but this body has a responsibility of oversight. We have pretended we are doing oversight, but we are actually not doing oversight--not a hearing, not a report, nothing. Thirteen billion dollars.

So, yes, I am going to oppose the CR tonight. I am not holding up the vote. I understand full well the responsibility of all 100 of us to put ourselves on the record. But if we are going to actually say we are going to do oversight, let's actually do oversight.

It is not unreasonable, when we all agree these are the facts and figures that should come from DHS to just tell us what is going on with the Afghan refugees, that we actually expect they are going to turn those things over.

So in the days ahead, I hope we will actually hold a hearing and actually get the facts. I hope we will actually demand that they turn over to us what we have required, and I hope we get a full accounting of how they are spending $13 billion on what we understand were 69,000 people, most of whom have not even been moved in and across the United States yet--$13 billion.

With that, I yield floor.

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