Hearing of the House Budget Committee - The President's Funding Request for Overseas Contignecy Operations

Hearing

Today Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, made opening remarks at the House Budget Committee hearing on The President's Funding Request for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). Below is a transcript of his remarks:

"Thank you Mr. Chairman. Let me start by joining the Chairman in welcoming all our distinguished witnesses and thank all of you for your service. And as the Chairman indicated, Mr. McCord, the Budget Committee takes full credit for all of your success today. Let me just say that we all here share the goal of ensuring that the men and women who are serving in our military and in our diplomatic corps have the resources necessary to perform the missions that we, as a nation, ask of them, and we should make sure that those resources are provided. In fact, that's why the President's budget, and the budget that I, together with my colleagues, put forward would replace the sequester for both -- on the defense side and on the non-defense side going forward in a way that continues to achieve the deficit reduction goals we all would like to achieve.

"But unfortunately, we still have that looming before us. We were able to get a short-term agreement, and that's provided some ability in the current fiscal year and the next fiscal year to maneuver, but we're going to have to address those issues.

"But as the Chairman said, we also have bipartisan agreement on this Committee that we have to make sure our budgeting is transparent and that we're honest in terms of what we allocate in the base budgets and what we say is war funding and something that belongs in the OCO account. In fact, this Committee adopted language as part of the budget resolution that we passed reaffirming that goal and that obligation.

"And unfortunately, if you look at the OCO budget over the last couple of years, we begin to see creeping allocations from the base budget into the OCO budget. And I have to say, this is not just on the side of the Administration. In fact, I think if you look at the record, Congress has actually been a greater offender in this area. But the reality is we have to work together -- the Executive branch, the Congressional branch -- to make sure that we have clear and transparent budgeting.

"And so that is our goal going forward. In the course of the hearing, we're going to talk about some examples where we've seen agency budgets, base budgets, creeping into the OCO account. I would just point out one example, which is that while the President has called for the drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan by a little over 25,000 troops by the end of the year, if you actually look at the in-theater support -- forces and budget -- in the other countries around Afghanistan, it's actually going up in this OCO budget. So I think that we're going to have to really carefully go through these issues on this Committee, with the Administration, to make sure that we don't fool ourselves into thinking that some of the obligations that are really enduring obligations are budgeted for in the OCO account.

"So, thank you Mr. Chairman. I look forward to the hearing."

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