Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, earlier today I came to the floor to talk about the danger this Republican budget poses to our economic and national security. I would like to expand on why this budget is out of balance and to further highlight the risks of using OCO, as some of my colleagues on the other side have proposed, instead of eliminating the sequester.

This budget, instead of taking a balanced approach to growing our economy and fiscal responsibility, like raising revenue by closing egregious tax loopholes and investing that revenue in job creation measures, doubles down on unrealistic and unfair cuts to programs that help grow and strengthen America's middle class. This perverse standard is evident across this budget and it reinforces a disturbing trend by my colleagues on the other side--if it is a broad- based investment in our economy, like investing in infrastructure or providing aid to jobseekers, then it must be paid for by cuts on the backs of middle-class Americans; but, if it is for a set of powerful special interests like the extension of tax expenditures then the deficit doesn't matter to many of my colleagues on the other side. This sort of double standard is what causes the American people to feel that Congress is out of touch.

Most alarmingly, this budget does not eliminate the automatic spending reductions, known as the sequester, contained in the Budget Control Act. The Senate Republican budget leaves hundreds of billions of dollars in devastating automatic cuts to discretionary spending in place and then makes an additional $236 billion in cuts over 10 years to investments for middle-class families. These cuts to our non-defense and defense budgets will cause substantial harm to our economic and national security. That is why we have to eliminate the sequester--and why there must be balance in relief for non-defense and defense sides of the ledger.

Every senior civilian and military leader in the Department of Defense who has come before the Armed Services Committee has warned that if defense budgets are subject to sequestration, we will likely not be able to meet the national defense strategy without an unacceptable level of risk. It will have a damaging impact on our military readiness, modernization, and the welfare of our service members and their families.

Earlier today I mentioned the testimony of Admiral Gortney and General Kelly and how the non-defense and defense sides of the budget work together to protect our homeland. Indeed, helicopters and cutters from the Coast Guard, which falls on the non-defense side of the ledger, are critical to stopping drug smuggling and human trafficking into the homeland. And General Kelly made clear that, because of the limited number of Coast Guard cutters available, they are only stopping about 20 percent of the traffic--and there is a direct correlation: the more cutters they have, the more trafficking they can stop.

Senator McCain and Senator Graham have been trying repeatedly to increase spending for defense accounts. Their absolute commitment to the men and women of the armed services is without question. However, they have been compelled, by those opposed to an increase of the base budgets of the Armed Forces and who favor the continuation of sequestration, to resort to a budgetary gimmick.

They would use the Overseas Contingency Operation account to try and increase defense spending to the President's base level of $561 billion.

First, I believe we should just eliminate the sequester all together, and that means going to the Budget Control Act cap of $577 billion for defense in FY16. Second, using OCO as an escape valve as my Republican colleagues have suggested isn't sustainable. It is a gimmick and as we have heard in testimony, OCO funding isn't flexible as discretionary spending and could damage our long-term readiness.

General Odierno, Chief of Staff of the Army, made this point:

So first, I would just say there's a risk to not funding the base, in putting it in OCO, because with that has to come flexibility within OCO for us to spend it on the things that are necessary. So ..... because OCO has limits and it has restrictions, and it has very strict rules that have to be followed. And so if we're inhibited by that, it might not help us. What might happen at the end of the year, we have a bunch of money we hand back because we're not able to spend it.

General Welsh, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, made a similar point in describing the Air Force's need for modernization and how one-off funding through OCO particularly constrains its platform-based force.

That is not how we should support the greatest fighting force in history. This may seem to be a clever way to bypass the Budget Control Act, but it has real ramifications for our men and women in uniform.

Indeed, the problem with these approaches is that they don't work. And, it seems even Senator Graham's amendment to boost OCO funding in the budget runs into technical difficulties. Indeed, it does not appear to do what it purports to do--to boost defense spending--because it fails to lift the actual OCO cap. Now, it is true that a budget resolution isn't law, but plays an important role in the process of governing and setting the rules for our appropriations process.

Now, I expect there will be an attempt to correct that on the floor, but we shouldn't be engaging in these diversions to begin with. We should be crafting a budget that is serious and acknowledges our economic and security needs.

So my colleagues and I are offering several amendments in order to demonstrate there is a better path and to address some of the glaring problems with this budget. However, as we have seen with Senator Sander's reasonable attempt to provide $478 billion in transportation funding, paid-for by closing egregious offshore tax loopholes, my colleagues refuse to agree to the kind of commonsense proposals that I believe a vast majority of Americans would support.

But I hope my colleagues can join with me on some of these types of measures like ones to establish a budget point of order that will keep borrowing costs down for students; closing egregious offshore tax loopholes--which during our last budget debate was a bipartisan amendment adopted by voice vote; or lowering drug prices for seniors by letting the Secretary of HHS negotiate drug prices--indeed, it is particularly troubling that many pharmaceutical companies dodge taxes through offshore tax loopholes, but profit off of Medicare, and are legally protected from having to negotiate drug prices with the government.

We have a blueprint for responsibly managing the budget and meeting the needs of a great and growing nation. It requires a balance of cuts, which we have done already, and new revenue. And as we see demonstrated by the Republican budget, we cannot cut our way to prosperity--much less cut our way towards a balanced budget. And we all know that the best way forward is to promote broad-based economic growth so that millions of hardworking Americans and their families can have a brighter and stable economic future.

So I hope my colleagues on the other side will join with us in supporting amendments that put middle-class families and broad-based economic growth first.

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