National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016
Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise in support of the NDAA that is on the floor now but also in strong support of an amendment that has been offered by Senator Reed of Rhode Island to the NDAA. Actually, I have a deja vu feeling in the speech, because the speech is largely about what I gave as my maiden speech in February of 2013; that is, the BCA budget caps and sequester.
To begin, before I focus on the amendment from my colleague from Rhode Island, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, I do think there is a lot of good policy in the NDAA. We worked on it together. That committee process is a productive one. I think we always find a great degree of bipartisanship as we are trying to tackle the programmatic description of our Nation's military budget and support. There is much good policy, acquisition reform, and other key reforms that are part of this budget. There are some items that I feel very strongly about dealing with shipbuilding and ship repair.
I think it is great that we are having the debate on the floor. We have had NDAAs passed, but we have not had a lot of floor time on them in 2013 and 2014. So the fact that we have are having this debate about the critical nature of our Nation's defense and the authorizing bill on the floor is very positive.
There are some aspects of the NDAA that I do not like. There are some items that I wish were in there but that are not. That is part of the process. I think we could all say that, but I am glad we are having the debate on the floor. However, the item that is in the NDAA that I have the greatest concern about is the use of what I consider a flagrant budget gimmick to sneak by defense spending caps that were imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.
I think the gimmick is a serious one and a challenging one. The gimmick is dishonest. It is bad for the Nation's defense. It is also bad for America's nondefense priorities.
The good news is that the budget can be fixed. My colleague from Rhode Island, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, has a proposal to fix it. The proposal was offered in committee and rejected, and it has been offered again on the floor. I want to describe it and explain why I strongly support it.
First, there is the gimmick itself. Just for the public on this, in August of 2011, before either I or the Presiding officer were in the body, Congress passed the Budget Control Act that imposed a set of draconian budget caps on defense and nondefense spending as a punishment, in case Congress did not find a grand budget deal. So the wisdom of this body at the time was that we will sort of punish ourselves unless we can find a budget deal. I describe that colloquially as if we don't do something smart, we will do something stupid.
Well, Congress did not do something smart. There wasn't the grand budget deal that many hoped there would be. So on March 1, 2013, budget caps went into effect that put a significant crimp in both the defense and nondefense items in the Nation's budget. The first speech I gave on the floor was in February 2013. After my first State recess week, I traveled around and I heard my constituents talk about how bad these caps would be, especially for the Nation's defense. I stood up and just shared what my constituents had described to me. But, nevertheless, the caps went into effect and we agreed, through the early 2020s, to limit in a very significant and tough way both defense and nondefense spending.
So what is the gimmick that is in this NDAA that is on the floor today?
A decision was made that the world has changed since August 2011. ISIL has grown up and is gobbling up acres and square miles of territory. We are battling against Ebola, as we were earlier in the year. North Korea is cyber-attacking major American corporations. Vladimir Putin has moved into Ukraine and is threatening other nations.
There are a lot of challenges. So it was the wisdom first of the President, in submitting the fiscal year 2016 budget, and then of the Armed Services Committee that living under the sequester defense caps was a bad idea. It would be a bad idea for the Nation. But instead of just saying: OK, the caps are a bad idea; let's adjust the cap--which we can do with 60 votes in this body and the concurrence of the House--a decision was made: Let's not adjust the cap, let's end-run the cap.
So we want to exceed the cap. We want to exceed it by $38 billion in fiscal year 2016. But rather than adjust the cap, let's do this: Let's just take $38 billion that the Nation needs to be safe, and we will put it in what is called the OCO account, Overseas Contingency Operations. It is something that is not subject to the cap. It is supposed to be used for core warfighting activity. But the $38 billion does not represent core warfighting.
We spent $2 billion in the last year, for example, in the war on ISIL. We are not going to spend $38 billion in the next year. No, instead, we are going to fund all kinds of nonemergency, noncontingency, nonwarfighting expenditures that would require an adjustment of the cap, and we are just going to put them into the OCO account, kind of a slush fund. By doing that, we end-run the law of Congress, the Budget Control Act.
I asserted, and I strongly believe, that this is dishonest, it is bad for defense, and it is bad for the nondefense accounts. It is dishonest. It is dishonest because, if we need this money for defense, we should fix the budget control caps. That is what we should do. We should not call expenditures for daily operations that are not core warfighting part of the OCO account. That violates the way the OCO account has been treated.
Once we go down that path, we are going to see everything going into the OCO account, and we will really end-run. So we are not being honest with ourselves, but especially, since we all know what the game is, we are not being honest with the public.
Second, putting this money, the $38 billion, in the OCO account is bad for defense. Defense needs the ability to plan. If we put the money in the OCO account, is it going to be here next year? Is it not going to be here? There is sort of a wink and a nod that it will probably be here. We ought to be acknowledging that these funds are needed in the base defense budget so that our DOD personnel can plan that it will be there in the future, because that is probably our intent. It is bad for defense to put this in this OCO account.
Third, it is bad for the nondefense accounts. If we are going to say that the BCA caps are bad, we should adjust them. Instead of using an end run, let's adjust them. Let's adjust them not just for the defense accounts but also for the nondefense accounts, because, as the Presiding Officer and my colleagues here know, the nondefense accounts are critical to the Nation's defense.
The FBI is nondefense. It is critical to the Nation's defense. Homeland Security is critical to the Nation's defense. In the Department of Energy, much of the research we do is for the reactors on nuclear carriers and nuclear subs. Those get cut by budget cups. They are critical to defense. We ought to be lifting the caps on the nondefense accounts, as well.
So the gimmick that is used is a gimmick. It is dishonest. It hurts defense. It hurts nondefense accounts that are important to the Nation. Good news--there is a solution. We are doing this because we do not like the budget caps. That is why we are doing this. That is why we are using the OCO gimmick. If we don't like the budget caps, we should fix them. We should find the 2015 version of the Murray-Ryan budget deal that was reached in December of 2013, where we agreed to adjust the budget caps. That deal accepted part of sequester. It absorbed sequester cuts. But it also found targeted ways to provide relief, both to defense and nondefense accounts. That is what we should be doing. We should be showing the same leadership that was shown in 2013.
I rise to say that the amendment that my colleague from Rhode Island, our ranking member, proposes does exactly that. It does exactly that. It takes the $38 billion that is in our budget, which I believe should be spent on defense, and it says that this money should be spent on defense, but it should be spent the right way, as part of a base budget, not as part of OCO.
It puts a fence around those dollars and says that the money is there, and it is there for defense because the Nation needs it. But the fence will keep the money from being utilized until we fix the BCA caps on both the defense and nondefense accounts.
If we do fix the BCA caps, that money will be available. Because of language included by the chair of the committee in the markup, fixing the budget caps would move the money from the OCO account into the defense base budget where it should be. I think we all know what the right answer is here, which is for this $38 billion to be used to protect the Nation but to be part of the base budget, not the OCO account. To get there we need to fix the BCA caps across the board for defense and nondefense. The Reed amendment would accomplish that. That is the reason that I am on the floor today, to praise the debate on the NDAA but to say this is the right way to keep our Nation safe.
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