Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I thank my colleague, Mr. Mulvaney from South Carolina, and our colleagues for offering this bipartisan amendment.

Mr. Chairman, just last month, Secretary of Defense Hagel and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified before this House as to the amount of money that would be necessary to support the war in Afghanistan and our overseas operation, the so-called OCO account. What they told this Congress was that the President's request of $80 billion was the amount necessary to accomplish our objectives and to support our troops. Yet this defense spending bill that is before us adds another $5 billion that was unasked for and unnecessary.

So if there are extra moneys stuffed into this account, why are they put in this account as opposed to somewhere else? The answer is that it's a very clever accounting scheme because the other account, the base budget for defense spending, is subject to a cap, but moneys for the war account are not. So every dollar you somehow put into the war account is a dollar that escapes the cap. You can put lots of dollars into that war funding account, even though they have nothing to do with supporting overseas operations. I give the committee an A for creative accounting and an F for truth in budgeting.

What this amendment does is it says to the military we're going to provide you the funds you asked for, but, as the gentleman from South Carolina said, we're actually going to add $1.5 billion additional for the Guard and the Reserve.

There's no reason we should be throwing money into the war accounts that don't belong there simply as an accounting scheme to avoid the cap.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source