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Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, my amendment would eliminate the statutory requirement for the Defense Department to provide Congress with an unfunded priorities list. This is a wish list of items that DOD would like to have but are not necessary to carry out its duties.

This practice doesn't meaningfully strengthen our national security. Instead, it worsens waste, fraud, and abuse in military spending. These wish lists are packed with billions of dollars of superfluous line items, this year totaling $24 billion on top of the $773 billion requested by the White House.

Don't just take my word for it. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last year that the President's budget request for fiscal year 2022 met DOD's requirements, yet DOD was required by law to submit these wish lists, which have not been approved by any top leadership at the Defense Department as actual priorities.

Top DOD officials have, in fact, expressed strong skepticism about the practice. In a June 2021 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, General Milley said of unfunded priorities: ``If they were critical, then they need to be higher on the priority list and in the base budget.''

In April, Under Secretary McCord said that the unfunded priorities lists ``should not be confused with saying that the budget is not adequate.'' In fact, he went on to describe to me the problem that happens when different people within the Defense Department who are overseeing their own units submit something and just say it is a priority when overall Defense leadership has not had the opportunity to prioritize, actually, and to even look into whether those things are priorities or not.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates all but banned the list, strongly discouraging his generals from submitting these lists to Congress during his tenure.

Despite the skepticism of top DOD officials, the Pentagon is required by law to submit these wish lists to Congress. It wasn't always that way. Though the practice has been around for a couple of decades, unfunded priority lists weren't statutorily required until 2017.

All my amendment does to make this process optional again.

The mandate only exists to serve the interests of defense contractors eager to grow their profits by selling flashy equipment. In 2021, the defense industry spent more than $118 million lobbying Congress to sell their products. Meanwhile, we cannot even verify that the money we authorized to DOD is spent responsibly because, as my colleague Ms. Lee said, it has never passed a budget audit.

The most recent audit found a Navy warehouse full of $126 million of aircraft parts that were not listed anywhere in the records. We don't need to encourage this irresponsible spending by requiring DOD to give us a wish list, but most importantly, we should actually pay attention to the priorities of the top leadership of the Defense Department, which the unfunded priorities list does not do.

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