National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016
Floor Speech
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Mr. Chairman, I want to congratulate the chairman--this is his first year as chairman--on his hard work on this bill, and there are a lot of very good things in this bill. I think most prominently is the reform the chairman mentioned, the compensation reform. We formed a commission to study how we do personnel compensation and the retirement system. In a very rare move, we actually followed some of the advice of that commission in this bill and made, I think, some very positive reforms to the personnel compensation system. There are a variety of other reforms the chairman has worked on that are important. There is also a whole slew of provisions in there that do, in fact, do an excellent job of providing for the men and women who defend our country. So there are a lot of very positive things about this bill.
I appreciate the hard work of everyone involved.
Unfortunately, for the first time in 19 years, I am going to be opposing the NDAA on the floor for two reasons, but one is really the big one, and it is understanding how our budget has worked.
We have not had a normal budget appropriations process since 2011, and this has affected every single government agency--and keep that fact in mind--not just the Department of Defense. I will talk about the Department of Defense at length. But the lack of a normal appropriations budget process has impacted every single Federal agency: transportation, infrastructure, education, housing, on down the line.
Ever since 2011, Mr. Chairman, they have faced one government shutdown and a succession of threatened government shutdowns and continuing resolutions. This has made it absolutely impossible to plan long term and also has cut a pretty dramatic amount of money out of all of these agencies. It has been particularly hard on the Department of Defense, which tries to do a 5-year plan when they are figuring out what they can procure. This sort of halt, stop, we are going to fund you, we are not going to fund you, we are going to shut down the government, CR, has had a devastating impact on the ability to fund government.
The budget resolution passed by the House and the Senate this year does not fix that because it relies on the overseas contingency operation fund, which is limiting. It is 1 year of money. It, again, does not allow the Department of Defense to be planned. I want everyone to know the Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, in the Senate, testified on why OCO, funding $38 billion of the Defense bill through OCO, is unacceptable, and he doesn't support it and doesn't support this bill.
But the reason we oppose this--and this is very important to understand--to fix the problem, to get us to the point where we can fund Defense and everything else in a reasonable way, we need to get rid of the budget caps from the Budget Control Act. That is the only way. And we do not do that here. We take money out of the overseas contingency operation fund to give Defense 38 billion additional dollars.
But, in one sense, Mr. Thornberry is wrong when he says that in all senses what we do here matches what the President did. Within the Defense budget, the number is the same. But the President's budget also lifted the budget caps for the 11 other appropriations bills.
I know we serve on the Armed Services Committee, and I have heard members of the Armed Services Committee say, ``Don't talk to me about that stuff. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. That is not my department.''
I would love to know what district those people are living in because roads and bridges and schools and housing, it affects all of us, and those budget caps remain in place.
What this Defense bill does, unfortunately, is it locks in the Republican budget. It locks in the deal they made with the Senate to continue to provide devastating cuts at the Budget Control Act level for everything else and then let Defense and only Defense out of jail in an awkward sort of backdoor way through the overseas contingency operations.
To agree to this bill is to agree to cuts in those 11 other bills--to cuts in transportation, to cuts in research, to cuts at NIH and CDC, in all of these programs that we care about. If we accept this, then those cuts are locked into place.
Don't get me wrong. I support spending $38 billion more on the Defense budget; I support the President's level; I support this level, but I also support lifting the budget caps for all of the other areas of our government that are facing the same sort of devastating cuts and difficulties that the Defense Department has. If we agree with this, we lock in the budget.
Lastly, I want to point out that the President has said he does not support this process. He opposes all the appropriations bills, and he will oppose this Defense bill. The President hasn't gone away. There is not a sustainable veto override number for those appropriations bills in the House and the Senate.
The CHAIR. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield myself an additional 2 minutes.
Everything that we are doing on this bill and in the appropriations bills between now and October is--and I know the Republican plan is to hope the President just sort of changes his mind and signs all those bills; I consider that highly unlikely--so what is going to happen is we are going to get to October, and this is all going to blow up anyway because the President is not going to sign it.
He is still there. I know the Republicans won the Senate, but the President didn't go anywhere, and the Constitution didn't change, and nothing becomes law unless he signs it.
What I urge is that the President, the House, and the Senate--all three--sit down and come up with a budget solution that ends the budget caps for all of these bills so we can start working on something that is real. I mean, this $38 billion is great, but like I said, between here and when it heads up Pennsylvania Avenue, it is going away, and then we are going to have to double back and try to fix this anyway.
I guess all I am saying is we should start now instead of risking another government shutdown, risking another continuing resolution, and get a true budget agreement that actually addresses the Budget Control Act in its entirety, doesn't just find a sort of awkward workaround through the overseas contingency operations just to take care of Defense.
I support this level, but not this way. It has too devastating an impact on the rest of our budget, and as Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said, OCO funding is no way to fund the Defense Department if it is not legitimately for OCO expenses.
Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to myself just to respond briefly to Mr. Thornberry's remarks.
The problem, too, why this won't actually fund our troops is it is OCO funding to begin with; and, as the Secretary of Defense said, it makes it very difficult to do it in any sort of comprehensive way.
More importantly, when we get to the end of the process, if the President doesn't agree to it, then we haven't funded the troops at this $38 billion additional level. If that is where he is at on the veto on these appropriations bills, then we haven't done it. We simply run the clock out for another 4 or 5 months.
We have got to get to a budget agreement that the President agrees to, or we are not going to fund the troops at the level that I agree with the chairman that we need to fund them at, and this bill does not do that.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I just want to respond briefly when basically it is called unconscionable to oppose something. Aside from being unbelievably arrogant, it is wrong to say that there is no reason whatsoever to vote against this bill.
I mentioned earlier that there were--I am sorry, if he can call me ``unconscionable,'' I suppose I can call him ``arrogant.'' I don't know; it seems fair.
At any rate, there is another reason not to vote for this bill, and that is that it underfunds readiness once again. It says this matches the President's budget, and overall it does, but it has $2.4 billion less in money for readiness. Last year's bill had $1.5 billion less in readiness. Why?
Because every effort that the Department of Defense makes to cut just about anything--the movements that they wanted to make to start a BRAC, the changes that they wanted to make to the National Guard to save money, the plan they had to lay up 11 cruisers, the efforts to get rid of the A-10--efforts to move anything around are blocked by this committee, and they take that money out of readiness to fund what really amounts to a personal priority.
What does it mean to take money out of readiness? It means that our troops do not get the training that they need to be prepared to fight. It is just that simple. Readiness money is the money for the ammo. It is the money for the fuel. It is the money for the mechanic to fix equipment. That has been going down and down and down and down as we block every effort to save money anyplace else because just about anything the Pentagon is going to do is going to affect somebody's district. The A-10 is in somebody's district. Every other project is made in somebody's district.
We protected all that at the expense of readiness, and I think that is the worst thing that we can do. It has created a situation where we may well be sending our men and women off to fight unprepared and untrained. And you talk to the people who are serving. They are not able to fly as much as they used to. They are not able to train as much as they used to. They are not able to use their weapons as much as they used to because of those continuous cuts to readiness, because we fund other priorities. That is number one.
Number two. Funding through OCO, as the Secretary of Defense has said, is not the same as actually funding the Department of Defense through a regular appropriations process. It is one-time money. What the Secretary of Defense has said is:
Giving us this one-time money makes it impossible to plan. We don't know if it is going to be there next year. You can't have a 5-year plan under OCO money. You are restricted in where you can spend it and how you can spend it. So this is not adequately funding our troops.
I do take offense at the notion that opposition to this bill means that you just don't support our troops. That is the bumper sticker--sorry, I won't use that word. It is wrong to say that about anyone who opposes this bill. I oppose this bill because I don't think it does adequately fund our troops. It doesn't take care of the budget problems that are in front of us.
The CHAIR. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. COURTNEY. I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.
Mr. SMITH of Washington. The only way to adequately fund our troops is to get rid of the Budget Control Act, so we can actually fund it under regular order with a normal amount of money that allows them to plan for over 5 years.
Lastly, I am sorry, but the infrastructure of this country matters. The fact that bridges are falling down matters. The fact that we don't have enough money to do research on critical disease matters. Yes, it is important to defend this country. Yes, that is the paramount duty. But if the country itself crumbles while we have a military to defend it, that too is a problem and one I think worth fighting for, worth standing up and saying we are not going to accept a budget that guts all of these other things and uses the overseas contingency operation as a work-around to fund defense.
It is basically acting like this is free money. Well, it is not free money. It costs, and it undermines the entire rest of the budget. Let's get rid of the Budget Control Act. Let's get rid of the caps. Let's get rid of sequestration. We don't do that in this bill, and it is my contention that if we don't do that, then we are not adequately funding our troops and adequately funding our defense.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. It is not a matter of not supporting our troops. To say that the decision to oppose the defense bill is because you don't support the troops I hope the gentleman would agree is not where we are coming from.
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