Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Chair, I rise in support of H.R. 8070.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution mandates that Congress shall provide and maintain a Navy. The Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee's work clearly met that mandate, thanks in large part to the great leadership of my friend and chair of the subcommittee, Trent Kelly.

The biggest challenge our subcommittee faced stemmed from the Navy's proposal to eliminate a Virginia-class submarine from the FY25 budget. This is a sharp deviation from the two-per-year procurement rate Congress has authorized and funded for the last 13 years and, coming on the heels of last December's passage of AUKUS authorities to sell three submarines to Australia, screamed out for the subcommittee to exercise its constitutional duty of review and oversight.

First, our analysis found that the Navy's attempt to shield supply chain vendors from the impact of a cut falls short. It leaves out hundreds of critical suppliers whose investment in on-time deliveries has been identified as the number one strategy to reduce construction delays. For these suppliers, cutting procurement means cutting orders for their business. That is a cure that worsens the problem. It doesn't fix it. Our professional staff confirmed that the Navy's plan needs an additional $1 billion to achieve its stated goal of avoiding vendor instability and hesitancy.

Mr. Chair, all of us are concerned about construction delays aggravated by the pandemic, but the subcommittee also recognized the momentum that is happening in real time in the submarine industrial base.

The 24th Virginia-class submarine, USS New Jersey, was delivered 2 months ago, and the Iowa and Massachusetts are slated for delivery by the end of this year. Idaho and Arkansas will follow shortly after with deliveries in 2025, bringing the program total to 28 submarines. In the New England shipyards, the production cadence has accelerated to 1.4 up from the COVID dip of 1.2.

As a result of all this, our bill takes a different path. It heeds the calls from our combatant commanders and builds on the surge in deliveries by restoring a second Virginia-class submarine to the Navy shipbuilding account and fully resources the supply chain.

Under the able leadership of Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Smith, this bill passed 57-1 out of the committee after bipartisan input from all Members, an extraordinary achievement in this very polarized time in Congress.

Hopefully, all the Members of this Chamber will work to maintain that successful approach and not load up this bill with divisive amendments.

Mr. Chair, I give special thanks to the talented committee staff for their outstanding work, and I urge all Members to support the committee's intent to focus on strengthening defense and rejecting the obvious poison pills that undermine the 63-year tradition of bipartisan passage of the NDAA.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source