National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I have been a member of this Chamber for a while now, and during my time here few of our colleagues have done more to expose waste and duplication and overspending than our colleague from Oklahoma Senator Coburn. I am, of course, cognizant of the fact that Senator McCain, the senior Senator from Arizona, has quite a reputation himself in this area. I am pleased to join both of my colleagues, along with, I anticipate, the junior Senator from Arizona, to talk about some very important work Senator Coburn and his staff have done to help highlight the savings we can find within the Defense Department budget due to duplication and waste and failure to exercise reasonable management practices, such as audits. We can save money and reallocate that money to help our fighting men and women in uniform, help keep them safe and help maintain America's role as a preeminent military leader in the world.

Senator Coburn has pointed out in a new report I am sure he will talk about that we can save more than $60 billion by consolidating half the Federal Government's duplicative programs. Each of these programs has its own overhead, and through consolidation we can eliminate that overhead and still make sure the same amount of money is used to deliver the particular service. For that matter, if we were to consolidate just a third of the renewable energy programs, we could save $5 billion alone. If we stop sending unemployment checks to millionaires, we could save another $30 billion.

I am a proud defense hawk. We call it the Yellow Pages test in Texas. If you can look in the yellow pages and see a service being provided by the private sector, you have to ask, why is the government providing that service? But there is no ability of anyone to provide national security except for the Federal Government. It is the No. 1 reason for the Federal Government's existence, and it is a tragedy to see so much money wasted when it is needed so desperately by our military during these very dangerous times. It is, indeed, embarrassing that the Pentagon cannot even conduct an audit. They do not know where the money is. They do not know how it is being spent, how it is being misspent. So I am a proud cosponsor of my colleague's Audit the Pentagon Act. The Pentagon isn't scheduled to actually perform an audit until 2017, and I doubt they will be able to meet that deadline. I am sure we will hear more about that from the Senator from Oklahoma.

There is no good reason why the Pentagon shouldn't be able to tell the American people exactly how it is spending hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Don't get me wrong. If our military needed the money in order to protect the American people and to keep us safe, I would vote for that expenditure 10 times out of 10. But when I am told there is money that should be spent helping keep us safe and protecting our national security that is wasted through duplicative programs, through inefficiencies, through the inability to simply manage the hundreds of billions of dollars the Pentagon manages, it makes me livid, as I think it should all of the American people.

We know DOD continues to experience serious cost overruns with major acquisition programs. I know Senator McCain, in his capacity on the Armed Services Committee, has been an eloquent critic of these cost overruns of various acquisition systems. A 10-percent reduction in DOD waste could yield an annual savings of $60 billion--$60 billion. That is real money, and that is money that could either be reallocated to pay down the debt or could be reallocated to help fund very important overseas operations by our military in dangerous parts of the world or here at home.

The bottom line is that even those of us who are proud national security hawks should be pushing first and foremost to eliminate wasteful defense spending and to audit the Pentagon. In my view, those are no-brainers. We should not continue down the path of wasteful Washington spending and say: Well, we don't have enough money, so we are just going to bust the budget caps in the Budget Control Act. We shouldn't say: Well, we are not going to address the hard issues of wasteful spending at the Pentagon; we are just going to raise taxes. Those are cop-outs, and we shouldn't go there.

With that, I yield the floor for my good friend from Oklahoma.

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Mr. CORNYN. I ask the senior Senator from Arizona, as we discussed, he has been a critic and pointed out waste in the procurement process. I know the military, in designing state-of-the-art weapons systems, the F-35, for example, built in the notion of concurrency, where they are actually designing it while they are building it which creates cost overrun challenges. But I know the Senator was also instrumental in finally getting the Pentagon to negotiate a fixed-price contract. Could the Senator talk a little bit about some of the challenges?

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