Newbold-Buy American

Floor Speech

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, the more I learn about the Department of Defense's procurement policies and the procurement policies of other agencies, the more angry I get, the more angry this Congress should get, and the more angry the American citizenry should get.

In my home State of Connecticut, we pioneered America's shipbuilding and aerospace industries. However, today, as more and more of U.S. taxpayer dollars go overseas to buy equipment and parts and machinery for the U.S. military, those shops, once bustling with workers, are now silent.

We have example after example of how our procurement policy has gone wrong. You have the big-ticket, high-profile examples, like the Air Force KC-x Tanker which went to Airbus rather than to an American-based bid. You have the 21 helicopters that we are supplying to the Afghan military today that we are buying--not from an American manufacturer but from a Russian manufacturer. And then you have the thousands and thousands of smaller examples on seemingly a daily basis in which American companies come up short. When we buy Chinese-made doorknobs for the renovations at Camp Pendleton when there is an American company that can do the same work, when we buy our copper and nickel tubing for our subs from a German manufacturer, when there is an American firm that can do the same work, we are wasting billions and billions of American dollars sending our jobs overseas.

I am here today, Mr. Speaker, to talk about the latest affront on this issue. The Army, last month, offered a solicitation for 96 machines that will make dog tags for our service men and women. These iconic placards are not only a symbol of the life and death faced by our American soldiers, but they serve a crucial function in the field. Frankly, there is little else that embodies the American military tradition than those little plates that hang off of a soldier's neck.

An American company, NewBold, which manufactures its dog tag machines in Virginia, lost its bid to a company that manufactures those machines in Italy. Now while the NewBold machine was marginally--only about 4 percent--more expensive, they offered around-the-clock technical support for our soldiers in the field. Even after they filed a protest, the Army still awarded the bid to workers in Italy.

Unfortunately, due to the loss of this contract, NewBold is going to have to lay off some people, and the 4.7 percent that we saved is going to be completely offset by all of the lost income taxes to the Federal Government due to the layoffs, the lost payroll taxes, and all of the increased social costs like unemployment compensation. This is insanity. Not only are we now relying on an Italian-made machine to make one of the most iconic pieces of our military uniform--all to save just a few thousand dollars on the contract--but it is now going to cost the U.S. economy jobs, and it is going to cost the U.S. taxpayers additional expense. We can't allow this to continue, Mr. Speaker and my colleagues.

For the last year, I have been working with a bipartisan group of Members, including the previous speaker, Congressman Jones from North Carolina, so that we can shore up the loopholes in our ``Buy American'' policies, so that we can make sure that more of our U.S. taxpayer dollars stay here at home. I have introduced legislation that will do just that, that will begin to reorient our money here to American-made products for our U.S. military.

I've had enough. This country has had enough. As we bleed manufacturing jobs out of this country, the U.S. Government cannot continue to exacerbate that problem by sending U.S. taxpayer dollars overseas. It's time for this Congress to deem this practice unacceptable, to strengthen the ``Buy American'' provisions, and to bring our taxpayer dollars back home.

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