Drug Quality and Security Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

SEQUESTRATION

Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise today to speak in the midst of our budget conference about a topic that has consumed a lot of time here in this Chamber in the last number of months; that is, the effect of sequestration on the national economy and in particular the effect that sequestration is having on defense.

This was the subject of my first speech, my maiden speech as a Senator on the 27th of February, talking about the particular effect of defense sequestration, cuts on Virginia and the Nation as a whole. I return to it today not just to be repetitive but because we now finally are at the table in a budget conference, and, as the Presiding Officer knows, I think this conference gives us an excellent opportunity to find a better path forward for the Nation.

Sequestration, which went into effect in early March, has caused major damage to our economy and the capacities of our Defense Department. Our Defense Department is the most capable fighting force the world has ever seen. It is vital to our security, and Virginians and citizens of Wisconsin and every other State understand that.

Sequester was designed to be so painful that it would force Democrats and Republicans to find an alternative. We know that did not happen, so the pain that was never intended to come into effect has been in effect. We have seen the impact it has had on our economy since early March.

Fortunately, while we did not compromise in order to avert sequester, there is still time to compromise. Now when we are doing the hard work of a budget conference for the first time in 5 years, when we are doing the hard work of a budget conference in a divided Congress for the first time since 1986, it is now time to address these damaging cuts.

Let me talk for a second about the effect these cuts have first on Virginia but then on our national defense and preparedness. Our Nation's Defense Department has been strung along prior to sequestration for a number of years, 3 years, with continuing resolutions. That is jargon that we understand here. For regular folks, it is as if you are into the next year in your household and you are told: We cannot make a decision so we will spend this year exactly what we spent last year.

Well, wait a minute. We had a child in college last year who is not in college. Well, still you have got to put money into tuition.

Well, what about a new need we have this year that we did not have last year? Well, you cannot do it. You are limited to only what you did last year.

That is what continuing resolutions for 3 years in a row have done to Defense, with the exception of some anomalies that are passed. It is required for Defense to spend on the same line items and not, for example, invest more in important priorities. The one I always think of is cyber security. If you do continuing resolutions and you just spend what you spent a few years ago, we know we have a bigger need for cyber security than we had a few years ago. There are attacks every day. No one thinks the need to be diligent about cyber security is constant. No, we ought to be spending more. Instead, the continuing resolution requires our Defense and other departments to spend at yesterday's line items--or 3-year-ago line items. That does not make much sense.

In hearing after hearing in our Budget Committee, in the Armed Services Committee and others, our Nation's uniformed and civilian military leaders have emphasized the damage sequestration is having on our military. In every meeting with generals, admirals, Pentagon officials, I am struck by their calls to us as Democrats and Republicans, as Senate and House Members, to end this foolish policy. The next hearing we will have tomorrow is in the Armed Services Committee, when we will be hearing again about the effect sequestration is having on military readiness.

In Virginia, to pick one State, my home State has been hit very hard, in fact harder than any other State due to the large Federal workforce and many military bases. When you add to the sequestration and CR the effect of the shutdown we saw in September and October--the first 2 weeks of October--Virginians really feel it.

Today, a total of 177,982 Virginians are employed because of Federal funding either directly with DOD or one of the service branches or through military contracts. For example, the talented men and women at the Newport News shipyard are private contractors, but they manufacture the largest items that are manufactured on planet Earth, nuclear aircraft carriers. They do it to keep American men and women safe. This summer over 70,000 DOD civilians in Virginia were furloughed. Construction training and maintenance on military bases was delayed, which affected private contractors. If sequester continues, as some are saying--some are fatalistic about it: Well, we cannot do anything about it--if sequester continues into 2014, 34 planned ship maintenance availabilities will be canceled in the new year. Each of these maintenance projects is massive and employs so many people. As many as 19 of these are on the east coast--34 is the national figure, 19 of these are on the east coast, including Virginia. This will hurt the ship repair industry in Hampton Roads, and could lead to a loss of about 8,000 jobs nationally in the ship repair industry.

Not only have these cuts flowing from sequestration affected my State's economy, but probably more to the point for all of us in this body, we ought to be concerned because they are affecting our national security and they are degrading the capability of our military to deal with challenges.

I wish I could say that since I was sworn in as a Senator with the Presiding Officer on January 3 the world has become a lot safer and more peaceful and less complicated. But to the contrary. In the 10 months we have been here, sadly, we have seen more instances of danger, more things to be concerned about, more problems we have to deal with. We are not in a static situation. We are shrinking our budget at the same time as the degree of challenges we have around the world is growing more dangerous.

Just this year, the sequestration cuts that went into effect in March have grounded one-third of our U.S. combat aircraft. Think about our Air Force and how important it is in today's defense and planning for warfare. One-third of our combat aircraft are grounded because of sequestration, hampering our ability to respond to global crises and maintain strategic advantages. If sequester goes forward, that one-third will grow. The Air Force will be forced to cut additionally, by as much as 15 percent. That would suggest that nearly 50 percent of America's combat aircraft will be grounded in 2014 due to the sequester. We have to ask ourselves: How can we not have an Air Force ready to respond to crises at a moment's notice?

Moving to the Navy. Our naval capabilities have also been significantly curtailed, reducing our normal levels of three carrier groups and three amphibious groups ready to respond to crisis within 1 week to only one of each. So, again, a two-thirds reduction in the availability of carrier forces or amphibious vehicle forces that can meet that 1-week response time in the event of an emergency.

Again, we have got to have a Navy that is ready to respond when there are crises.

Then moving to the Army. This year, because of the first year of the sequester--and it gets worse--the Army cancelled all--all--combat training center rotations for any nondeploying unit. So if a unit is being deployed, they are being trained, but then other units that do not have a regular assigned deployment stay trained as well to meet an emergency need. If we know we are going to be deploying a unit to Afghanistan to replace another unit that is coming back, then we will train that unit. But you do some training for the units you are not planning to deploy, just so they are ready if the need exists. But we have cancelled all of the training for nondeploying units. General Odierno has said that 85 percent of America's brigade combat teams cannot meet the current training requirements that are set in our defense strategy.

We have asked what that means. When folks come before us, we ask what does it mean, you are not getting the training? Does it mean you will not go if there is a compelling security need or national emergency?

They say: No, of course we will go. If the Commander in Chief or Congress were to say we have to go, we will go. But what training means is we will go, but we will suffer more casualties. What training does is give us the edge to succeed. The absence of training means--it is almost immoral to think about it--that we have a training standard, but if you put people in harm's way who have not been able to meet that training standard, you almost guarantee that the casualties will be more significant. That is not something any of us can comfortably look in the mirror and tolerate.

So it is not hard to see that what was promised about sequester is, in fact, true. Sequestration is not strategic. It was never designed to be strategic. It was not designed to be the careful cutting of costs that you might do, that you should do, that every organization should do. It is not only not strategic, it is not sustainable in the outyears.

The House Armed Services Committee--Republican House, Republican majority--many Republicans have admitted ``that sequestration of discretionary accounts was never intended to be policy.'' Our colleagues in the House, in a bipartisan way, have called for a lifting of sequestration, in terms of its effects on defense.

Our Armed Services Committee in the Senate, the SASC, also in the NDAA that we are about to debate on the Senate floor, reached the same conclusion. We were sitting in a markup of the NDAA bill. I noticed at the time as a SASC member there was nothing in the bill about sequestration. All of our hearings, virtually, had touched on sequestration. So I put an amendment on the table, kind of on the fly: Let's just say sequestration is bad and we should get rid of it. We debated it right there as we were marking up the bill. I recall that the vote on the amendment was 23 to 3.

Overwhelmingly in a voice vote, the Armed Services Committee, Democrats and Republicans, were willing to embrace the proposition that sequestration was bad. Actually the language was, not only is it bad for the DOD accounts, it is also bad for the other accounts as well.

That is why I am calling, in connection with our meeting as budget conferees, for a sensible bipartisan approach to limit the negative impacts of sequestration.

General Dempsey was talking to a group of Senators yesterday on the readiness subcommittee. He said: What we need to deal with in sequestration is money, time, and flexibility. The cuts are too steep; they are too frontloaded in terms of the timing; and there is too little flexibility for our military command to be able to use the dollars to do the right thing to keep us safe.

We have to find a way to get out of the sequestration dead end and restore some of the cuts and provide both the timing and flexibility to make the management of them easier. If we reverse sequestration in this budget conference, that will create, by economists' estimates, 900,000 jobs at a time when our economy needs to get stronger and our unemployment rates to be dropped. It will add a whole percentage point to our gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

So now as the budget conference committee is meeting--our next meeting is next week--I felt our opening meeting was a positive one. It was mostly positive because as we went around the table, House Members and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, there was an absence of what I would call the ``nonnegotiable'' language. I listened carefully. Being new, I do not necessarily know all of the details. But I know when I hear lines in the sand being drawn: We will not do this; we will not do that. When you hear that, you know the negotiations are going to be very difficult.

I applaud the 29 conferees for having that opening meeting and not putting a lot of ``not negotiable'' language out on the table. When we meet next week, I hope that attitude continues because we need colleagues from both sides of the aisle, in both the House and Senate, to work toward a positive solution in this conference that will do a number of things: Help us grow the economy; help us deal with the debt in a responsible way, not an irresponsible way, but lift the effects of sequestration so that we can be confident we will be safe as a nation.

I pointed out during the budget conference that while the House budget under the leadership of Chairman Ryan and the Senate budget under the leadership of Chairwoman Murray are different in a lot of ways, in other ways you can step back from them and say: The differences are not so mammoth that they cannot be resolved. They are the kinds of differences that legislative bodies around the country, State legislators often resolve. The top line difference between the House and Senate budgets for the 2014 year is about 2.5 percent of the Federal budget. You could argue that both of the top line numbers had a little bit of wiggle room in them in negotiation. So the actual difference, I would argue, between the two budgets, top line for 2014, is probably about 1.5 percent.

Given the challenges in the world, given the challenges in our economy, given the American public's desire to see us work together to find a compromise, and the upside we can achieve, if we do, I cannot believe that 1.5-percent difference in the top line is an insuperable obstacle for us. We have hard decisions to make. We need to make them with the interests of our own constituents but the entire country in mind, in particular, in this world where every day we hear of a new potential challenge that can threaten our security if we do not deal with it in a smart way.

We need to get past the continuing resolutions and the gimmickry and the shutdowns and sequestration, return to orderly budgeting, and do the hard work of finding compromise.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source