Moment of Silence in Remembrance of Members of Armed Forces and their Families

Floor Speech

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AMENDMENT NO. 50 OFFERED BY MS. MCCOLLUM

Ms. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

The Acting CHAIR (Mr. Hastings of Washington). The Clerk will designate the amendment.

The text of the amendment is as follows:

At the end of the bill (before the short title), insert the following new section:

Sec. __. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Department of Defense for sponsorship of NASCAR race cars.

The Acting CHAIR. The gentlewoman from Minnesota is recognized for 5 minutes.

Ms. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, first I would like to thank the staff, the committee staff on both the Republican and the Democratic side, and I would like to thank the floor staff for their patience, their hard work, their dedication and their help to me this evening.

Mr. Chairman, my amendment ends tens of millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on sponsorship for NASCAR race cars by the Department of Defense.

With trillion-dollar deficits, this amendment is where the rubber meets the road for my Republican tea party colleagues who want to cut wasteful spending.

Defense Department waste is nothing new. Many Americans remember in the 1980s the Pentagon was spending $400 for a hammer and $600 for a toilet seat. Now we have the Army spending $7 million for a decal on a racing car. Talk about taxpayer sticker shock.

For $7 million the Army buys a decal on a race car and a few driver appearances. But it's not only the Army spending millions of dollars. The Air Force sponsors a NASCAR race car for millions. So does the National Guard. Incredibly, over the past decade hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have subsidized race car owners and millionaire drivers in the name of military recruitment.

Now here's the $7 million question: Does slapping a sticker on a race car convince a young man or a young woman to volunteer to serve our country in the Armed Forces? Not according to the Marine Corps.

Fact. In 2006, the Marine Corps dropped its sponsorship of NASCAR. A Marine Corps spokesman said, We don't have a tracking mechanism to track how many people contracted because of seeing an advertisement on the hood of a car.

Fact. The same year, the Coast Guard dropped a $5 million NASCAR deal.

Fact. In 2008, the Navy dropped NASCAR sponsorship, saying, "it's not always easy to measure a return on investment.''

Unbelievably, that year the Navy also paid one driver, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., the outrageous sum of $800,000 in taxpayer funds--twice the salary of the President of the United States--just to make public appearances.

For all the tough budget cutters in Congress, you should know that the Citizens Against Government Waste has endorsed this amendment. So I would urge my Republican colleagues who are cutting homeless veterans, cutting law enforcement officers, cutting firefighters, why not cut some real waste and at the same time free NASCAR from its dependency on the American taxpayer?

This amendment gives Members a clear choice: a vote to end wasteful spending or a vote to keep wasting the American people's money. I urge a "yes" vote to end the funding to NASCAR.

I want to stress again, many parts of the military were using NASCAR sponsorship as part of their driver recruitment. They found that they could not track the success of this program, so they ended it, using their resources towards something that they knew that they could track, knew that they had something that was successful.

So, Members, I urge you to end the taxpayer funding to NASCAR. Let's put the dollars to work in the Department of Defense for something they know is trackable and accountable.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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