Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2025
Floor Speech
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Mr. CASE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this measure as currently drafted. I do so with true regret because hidden inside all of the rhetoric and surplusage of this measure as drafted is, in fact, the foundation of a solid and responsible bill to fund our national defense as our chair and ranking member have both highlighted.
This is very regrettable overall since our national defense funding measure has largely escaped these diversions and focused on national defense. However, instead, we have before us today, in reality, a proposal that is crippled by avoidance of inconvenient realities, sacrifice of long-term goals for short-term expediency, pandering to extreme viewpoints, and to my friend and colleague, the chair's comments in opening statements, too narrow, I believe, a definition of warfighting and military readiness.
Especially telling in all of this is that in virtually all of these categories, our military disagrees with the deletions, with the cuts, and with the initiatives.
Our military has a broader view. Our military, I believe, does have the proper perspective on the panoply of efforts that are required for true warfighting and military readiness.
There are many, many examples. We are going to hear about them. We already have. We are debating them in amendments, but I want to highlight two that are perhaps small in the big picture but that I think illustrate exactly what the issue is that we face with this particular measure.
First of all, I would highlight environmental remediation. Our military is, obviously, out there in our country and in our world, and their activities have consequences to our environment. They are charged with avoiding those consequences and with remediating where there are consequences. Yet, this particular bill would slash the environmental remediation and restoration activities budget, which is a small part in the big picture of the Defense Department's budget, by somewhere around 10 percent. This is of great concern to all of us because this is part of warfighting and military readiness.
I would just cite a small example of this to make the point. In my home State of Hawaii, a major center of our military activities on the island of Maui, on the top of Mount Haleakala, the largest mountain, there is an effort by the U.S. Space Force to build seven small telescopes that are critical to the national defense, as anybody who knows this knows. In the vicinity is an Air Force facility at which there was a fuel spill. That fuel spill is being remediated by the Air Force right now. It is critical. The Air Force is committed to remediating it. It obviously needs the funding to do so.
Whether the military, through the Air Force, does, in fact, remediate fully, fairly, and completely is a major issue to the community in whether they will support critically important Space Force telescopes. There is, obviously, a direct line in terms of the efforts to remediate to a national security interest, which I think we would all agree is truly in the range of military readiness.
Another small example is the Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration program, or REPI, which includes the acquisition of real property interest in land from willing landowners to prevent development and encroachment around our military facilities. It fulfills the military's own desire to protect native habitat and improve our military installation resilience to climate change and extreme weather.
This program is also the subject of the budget cutting knife under this program. The military wants REPI. They realize the benefit of REPI to their military readiness, to their warfighting capability. These, again, are very, very small examples, but I hope that they illustrate the basic point that when we take a look at the larger Defense budget, if we allow ourselves to get distracted, to exercise on denial tendencies, to focus on the short term without contemplating the long term, by taking extreme viewpoints into these areas, and, again, by constructing too narrow a definition of warfighting and military readiness, then we are going to miss the mark on this Defense budget. Mr. Chair, I believe in this draft we, unfortunately, have.
Luckily we are early in this process. I think there is plenty of room for us to debate and discuss these issues. I very much hope that we correct these deficiencies and that we produce a bill, as I hope and believe we have in the past and will again, that I can support.
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Mr. CASE. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.
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Mr. CASE. Mr. Chair, first of all, let's take a look at the actual language of the amendment. I have heard the arguments from my colleague about what this amendment does, but when you take a look at the actual language of the amendment, what you discover is uncertainty all over the place.
Let's start with the stated goal of cutting climate research from the Defense-wide research and development budget. Well, this doesn't specify that in the amendment itself. It talks about Defense-wide research and development budget, so I guess that means all Defense research and development that in any way, shape, or form may be linked in some way, shape, or form to evaluating the effects of the climate on defense research and development, so we don't really know what this amendment is doing in that department. That is number one.
Similarly, we have no idea what the increase in the Army's budget for unmanned ground vehicles is really all about. It is just a general increase. On a very basic level, the amendment just fails for lack of certainty and direction to the Defense Department.
However, let's be clear about what this amendment is actually all about. I take for granted that the gentleman, in fact, wants to increase funding for unmanned ground vehicles, but it is at the expense of further climate-related activities within the Department of Defense.
We, of course, had this discussion in the Appropriations Committee. This is a longstanding discussion. Already, this bill fails because it cuts $621 million out of the Defense budget in climate change programs that were in the President's budget.
This bill was screened, scrubbed, and word searched for anything that said ``climate change,'' and what was yielded was any program that said ``climate change.'' I suspect that they found some more somewhere that just had the word ``climate'' in them at this point, and that is where this $4.9 million, in fact, comes from.
We have had the discussion on the merits. This is contrary to what our own military believes is necessary, and I quote again from the Department of Defense's own climate risk analysis, focusing on the Indo-Pacific in this case, where we certainly have these issues: ``In the Indo-Pacific, sea level rise and more extreme weather events complicate the security environment, place key DOD warfighting infrastructure and surrounding communities at risk, and challenge local capacity to respond.''
This is our military talking. This is why our military opposes the reduction of $621 million to start with, much less to conduct any research.
My colleagues need look no further than our activities in the Department of Defense in the Indo-Pacific, in Korea, Okinawa, Japan, Guam, and Palau just to start with, where we are investing billions and billions of dollars.
Shall we not ask what the impact of climate change is on those installations, in those activities? By the way, shall we not provide for resilience, which is basically trying to determine what the actual hardening of those facilities or their activities is? Instead, let's just wipe out research altogether because that is the target here, of course, the research.
This is not the right approach from the perspective of a reasoned military overall. This is not the right approach from the perspective of certainty in terms of what we are designating. This amendment should not be adopted.
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Mr. CASE. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.
I appreciate my colleagues being focused on the unmanned ground vehicle program, and obviously, that is where they are focused. I would simply make the observation that we can have that debate as a matter of priorities, as to whether we invest in the unmanned ground vehicle program, but we should do it with certainty, with direction. We should not do it at the further expense of any research and development related to the impacts of climate on military readiness and warfighting capabilities.
Mr. Chair, I urge Members to oppose this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. CASE. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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