National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Madam President, as the Republican leader indicated pursuant to unanimous consent, I will shortly be offering a motion to instruct conferees on the fiscal year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act regarding the inappropriate use of overseas contingency operations funding in this bill.

The motion to instruct I am offering today directs the NDAA conferees to ``insist that the final conference report fully fund the President's budget request for the Department of Defense, including $534.3 billion in base budget funding and $50.9 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations or OCO budget funding, thereby supporting the bipartisan view that the funding caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011 should be eliminated or increased in proportionally equal amounts for the revised security and nonsecurity spending categories.''

This motion to instruct is consistent with the President's fiscal year 2016 budget request for defense, which assumed a resolution to the Budget Control Act, or BCA, dilemma that we have been trying to address. If this BCA situation is resolved, we can remove the threat of sequestration on both the defense and domestic spending. Unfortunately, the bill had to rely upon a budgetary--and it has been described by many people--gimmick by transferring $39 billion from the base budget request for enduring military requirements to the OCO budget, leaving a base budget that is just below BCA levels in order to avoid triggering sequestration.

In the absence of a resolution to the spending caps in the BCA, the administration has stated that any legislation that contributes to locking in massive cuts to nondefense departments and agencies--such as this one--will be subject to a veto.

Now one of my concerns is, when we use this device or gimmick this year, it will pave the way to use it next year and the following year and year after that. So we will have this enduring imbalance between security spending in the Department of Defense and nonsecurity spending in non-Defense Department agencies and a full range of governmental spending. Abusing OCO is completely contrary to the intent of BCA. The BCA was designed to impose proportionately equal cuts on defense and nondefense discretionary spending to force a bipartisan compromise. This approach unilaterally reneges on that bipartisan agreement.

OCO and emergency funding are outside the budget caps for a reason. They are for the costs of ongoing military operations and to respond to other unforeseen events like natural disasters. To suddenly ignore the true purpose of OCO and treat it as a budgetary device or slush fund to skirt the BCA is an unacceptable use for this important tool for our warfighters.

Just to highlight how this OCO gimmick skews defense spending, consider the amount of OCO in relation to the number of deployed troops. Most Americans have a very commonsense approach. If we have lots of troops engaged in operations overseas in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, then we need lots of OCO funding as well. In 2008--the height of our nation's troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 187,000 troops deployed--we spent approximately $1 million in OCO per troop. Under this bill, we would spend approximately $9 million in OCO for each of our deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Simply put, this approach, which circumvents the spirit of the law, is not fiscally responsible or an honest accounting nor is it consistent with the notion of why we created OCO in the first place, to support troops overseas engaged in overseas operations.

There is another point. True national security requires that non-DOD departments and agencies also receive relief from BCA caps. The Pentagon simply cannot meet the complex set of national security challenges without the help of other governmental departments and agencies, including State, Justice, and Homeland Security. In the Armed Services Committee, we heard testimony on the essential role of other government agencies in ensuring our national defense remains strong. The Department of Defense's share of the burden would surely grow if these agencies are not funded adequately.

The BCA caps are based on a misnomer that discretionary spending is neatly divided into security and nonsecurity spending. Let's be clear, essential national security functions are performed by governmental agencies other than the Department of Defense. As retired Marine Corps General Mattis said, ``If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.''

With regard to the threat from the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, Secretary of Defense Carter told the Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that ``the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, other agencies that are critical to protecting us against ISIL and other threats, they need resources too. And so that's another reason why I appeal for an overall budget perspective. ..... I really appeal for that, not just for my own department, but for the rest of the national security establishment, I think it's critical.''

According to a poll earlier this year, 83 percent of Americans think ISIL is the No. 1 threat to the United States. It is notable that of the administration's nine lines of effort to counter ISIL, only two, the security and intelligence efforts, reside within the responsibilities of the Department of Defense and intelligence community. The remaining seven elements for our counter-ISIL strategy rely heavily on our civilian departments and agencies.

For example, supporting effective governance in Iraq. We need our diplomatic as well as political experts at the State Department to engage with Sunni, Shia, Kurd, and minority communities in Iraq to promote reconciliation in Iraq and build political unity among the Iraqi people.

Building partner capacity. The coalition is building the capabilities and capacity of our foreign partners in the region to wage a long-term campaign against ISIL, much of what is being carried out by the State Department and USAID.

Disrupting ISIL's finances requires the State Department and Treasury Department to work with their foreign partners and the banking sector to ensure that our counter-ISIL sanctions regime is implemented and enforced.

Exposing ISIL's true nature. Our strategic communications campaign requires a truly whole-of-government effort, including the State Department, Voice of America, USAID, and others. The Republican approach to funding our strategic communications strategy is a part-of-government plan, not a whole-of-government plan, unless we recognize that we have to make adjustments in the BCA caps for every agency in the government.

Another aspect is disrupting the flow of foreign fighters. These foreign fighters are the lifeblood of ISIL. Yet the State Department and key components of the Department of Homeland Security are facing severe cuts, undermining ongoing work with partner nations to disrupt the flow of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq and to protect our borders here at home.

The sixth line, protecting the homeland. The vast majority of the Department of Homeland Security falls under nonsecurity BCA caps. This further demonstrates that the Republican plan is a misnomer, a gimmick, and an effort to play a game of smoke and mirrors with the American people. They are very critical to our security here at home. Yet they are in that ``nondefense'' part of the budget.

Humanitarian support is critical. It is even more critical as you look at the papers and see there is a huge number of people coming out of Syria. Military commanders will routinely tell you that the efforts of the State Department, USAID, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance is critical to our campaign, none of which are considered security activities under the Budget Control Act.

Taken together, this proposal, which is embedded in the underlying legislation, could compromise our broader campaign against ISIL and deprive significant elements of our government of the resources we need to do the job of protecting the American people.

In another respect, adding funds to OCO does not solve and sometimes complicates the DOD's budgetary problems. Defense budgeting needs to be based on our long-term military strategy, which requires the DOD to focus at least 5 years into the future. A 1-year plus-up to OCO does not provide DOD with the certainty and stability it needs when building its 5-year budget. As General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, testified, ``We need to fix the base budget ..... we won't have the certainty we need'' if there is a year-by-year OCO fix.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Carter told the Armed Services Committee, ``It's embarrassing that we cannot, in successive years now, pull ourselves together before an overall budget approach that allows us to do what we need to do, which is ..... program in a multiyear manner, not in a one-year-at-a-time manner.''

Abuse of OCO in this massive way risks undermining support for a critical mechanism used to fund the increased costs of overseas conflicts. We have to have a disciplined system for estimating the cost and funding the employment of a trained and ready force.

The men and women of our military volunteer to protect and are overseas fighting for American ideals, including good education, economic opportunity, and safe communities. Efforts to support all of these goals will be hampered unless civilian departments and agencies also receive relief from BCA caps.

Our young men and women who are sacrificing their lives overseas, not just to defeat the enemy in the field but to give opportunity for hope and a chance here at home for their brothers and sisters, for their aunts and uncles. Our servicemembers and their families rely on many of the services provided by non-DOD departments, including veterans employment services, transition assistance, housing and homeless support provided by various civilian departments and agencies, impact aid to local school districts administered by the Department of Education, the school lunch program provided by the Department of Agriculture, lifesaving medical research on issues such as traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, and suicide prevention, supported by the National Institutes of Health, health care for retirees and disabled individuals under Medicare, Medicaid services for parents, including military parents and children with special needs. All of these programs that benefit directly men and women in uniform and their families would be restricted, and I don't think that is why they are risking their lives, to see these programs that are helpful to them unnecessarily cut back.

Our national security is also inherently tied to our economic security. The President underscored this point on Monday when he said:

The reason we have the best military in the world is, first and foremost, because we have got the best troops in history, but it's also because we've got a strong economy and we've got a well-educated population and we've got an incredible research operation and universities that allow us to create new products that then can be translated into our military superiority around the world. We shortchange those, we're going to be less secure.

The NDAA has been accused of not being a funding bill. So we don't have to worry about the budgetary complications. But indeed we do. The stated purpose of the bill is to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2016 for military activities for the Department of Defense. It is one of the few bills we do every year to directly authorize appropriations. So it is intimately tied to the appropriations, to BCA, and to all of the issues I have talked about.

Indeed, we have said--and the committee has said repeatedly--that we are authorizing money. It is not just suggesting things to do but actually providing real money to the Department of Defense. If we do that, I think we have to do it in a way that does not use this OCO exception this year--and, unfortunately, in the years to come, if we let it happen this year--but that we are transparent, clear, and we put the money in the base budget and we move forward.

I think it is clearly within the scope of the conference. That is why I will be offering this motion to instruct. Everyone I talk to, on both sides of the aisle, with very rare exception, will make an individual strident pitch that we have to fix BCA, that this is not the best approach. I heard that this morning when we had General Dunford before the committee--on both sides of the aisle: These BCA caps are not the right way to fund our national defense and not the right way to fund other elements of government.

We can disagree on funding levels, but there seems to be a strong consensus that the BCA is not working for the benefit of the American people and we have to fix it. Yet we are not fixing it in the legislation that is before us nor are we doing things to help leverage such a discussion and to help us to come together to do what we all claim we want to do, which is to remove those arbitrary caps, avoid sequestration, and contribute to a whole-government approach--not just to national security but to economic prosperity, to educational opportunity. All of that has to be done not by using these budgetary loopholes not designed for the purpose they are being used for but by sitting down and coming up with sensible legislation.

We did it before with the great work of Senator Murray and Congressman Paul Ryan, and we have to do it again. So I will urge my colleagues to vote in favor, obviously, when this comes up--this motion to instruct--so we send the right message to our conference.

I yield the floor.

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