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Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, this bill provides the necessary support and direction for our national security. It also provides the necessary support for our servicemembers' families, and I am particularly pleased with the work completed by the Subcommittee on Readiness.

A big thank you to Ranking Member Waltz and Lamborn for their partnership in the subcommittee and also to the staff and all the members of the subcommittee, and particularly to Jeanine Womble, who was the staff director in this effort.

The Readiness Subcommittee's broad scope means that we cover everything from sustainment of weapons systems and facilities, including the safety of the men and women, military construction, climate change, energy, and environmental policy. While the readiness- related provisions are extensive, I would like to take a few minutes to highlight just a few.

In line with the work over the last 2 years, we continue to address vulnerabilities in installation and energy resiliency, both in response to extreme weather events and to ensure the Department can continue to accomplish its missions in the event of power disruptions. This bill works also to mitigate the military's effect of climate change and supports clean energy innovation, some of which you heard about just a moment ago.

We also continue to focus on sustaining and modernizing the organic industrial base. We cannot continue the readiness risk that neglect of our ports, depots, shipyards, and arsenals create. This is essential to ensuring that our state-of-the-art weapons systems can meet the challenges of near-peer competitors, not only the first day they arrive in the hands of the military, but in the days and years thereafter.

The health and safety of our military and civilian personnel will continue to be a top priority. This means that we will continue to address military housing, the PFAS contamination and mitigation issues, and also safety.

I am proud to represent two of the key military bases, Travis and Beale Air Force Bases and the men and women who work there.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Schakowsky for this amendment. It is very important. This is about fairness in the workplace. This is about the opportunity for workers to have a say in their work life. This is about an opportunity for major companies that want a contract with the United States Government Department of Defense to stay neutral in any unionizing opportunity that a union may be putting forward.

The rights of workers who support our defense industry would be protected by this amendment, and the Department of Defense would continue to have the flexibility in the contracting programs that they have.

With billions of dollars that we are going to be spending as a result of this and previous bills, let's be fair to the workers. If they want to organize, fine. For the companies, it is time for them to be neutral and not do the kind of practices that we have seen from companies such as Amazon and a few others.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Rogers well said why we should pass this amendment.

We have played a bad game here. If it is so important, if General McConville thinks it is so important, why didn't he fight vigorously for it in the base budget?

Yes, the President does propose, but that proposal is a proposal that comes from the Department, from all the various parts of the Department, and it is put together at the White House. The President doesn't just dream this up himself. It is, in fact, the priorities of the Department, disciplined priorities.

The unfunded list is a game where we are being played. We are the pawns in the game that they have. It was very well stated in the previous opposition to this amendment.

Let's have some discipline here.

The unfunded priorities list is a way in which the Department's various parts play us against each other and play the President. Let's eliminate all of that.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted by the last discussion, and I hope that whatever eloquence I might have would be useful in this regard because we are now debating some of the most important and profound issues that will ever come before this Congress, as it has in the past Congresses and in the future Congresses, and that is the role of nuclear weapons in our lives.

Mr. Speaker, we are involved in a new nuclear arms race, and this one is extremely expensive. But much more importantly, it is extremely dangerous because this arms race is designed to provide weapons delivery systems that are not observable and observation systems that are totally unreliable in a conflict--basically the satellite systems.

So this amendment deals with one part of the triad, and that is the ground-based missiles, some 400 or so, that are in silos in the northern Midwest. Those are the Minuteman III missiles. They are armed, they are ready, and the President, should there be an incident that would cause him to make a decision about launching those missiles, has something less than 15 minutes--probably less than 12 minutes--to make a decision to literally end life on this planet as we know it.

Those are the use-it-or-lose-it missiles, the Minuteman III.

We have the proposal underway--a no-bid contract worth about $125 billion over the next decade or so--to replace the current Minuteman III missiles and, quite possibly, the nuclear weapons that are on those missiles. We don't need to do that now. The Minuteman III missiles are viable for the next decade, almost the next two decades, if they are maintained.

The Air Force made a decision some years ago--about 7 years ago--to decide not to maintain them but rather to build a new missile system that was then called the GBSD ground-based secure system--it is now called the Sentinel--at a cost of about $125 billion in the next decade.

This amendment simply pauses the development of that missile system, calls for the refurbishment and maintenance of the current Minuteman III missiles for the next decade, and at that time a decision will be made by this Congress and future Congresses about what to do. It is simple.

There has been a lot of talk in the last hour or two about unfunded priorities or we ought to fund this and ought to fund that, I would suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, that we probably have somewhere in the range of $12 to $20 billion in the next couple of years and $120 billion in the next decade that we could easily spend on unfunded priorities or funded priorities.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to my remaining time.

Let's deal with two things here. First, with regard to the ability of the Minuteman III to be serviceable for the next 17 years, in fact, it has to be for the GBSD or the Sentinel to be put in place.

All the Sentinels will not arrive on day one. They will arrive year by year, Sentinel by Sentinel, over the next 17 years. The Minuteman IIIs will be maintained for that period of time, so it is not true that they cannot be maintained. They, in fact, will be.

Secondly, are we talking about deterrence, or are we talking about dominance? Do we have to have more to deter, or do we have a good deterrence in the next decade with the Minuteman III, the submarines, the aircraft, and the bombers of many different designs?

The fact of the matter is we have sufficient deterrence. The question is, do we want to dominate simply with numbers? We don't need to do that to deter, and we do have other priorities that we need to spend money on, much of which was discussed here.

The issue for us, it seems to me, is should we delay, for a decade, the development and placement of the Minuteman III replacement--that is, the Sentinel. The answer is we have other things to do. We have other priorities, and we will be quite safe enough. We will quite have enough deterrence.

With regard to the 87-1, that is being delayed because it cannot be developed in the near term.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, nobody has really said that we need 400. It has never been said we need 400. Maybe we need 399. Maybe we need even less than that.

The fact of the matter is that we have adequate deterrence without any of these particularly very dangerous missiles because they have to be used immediately upon threat. In 12 minutes, the President has to make a decision.

Here is the point. We have more than enough deterrence. Now, if we want to have more than they have, that doesn't increase the deterrence. That just increases the cost of the number.

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