Opening Statement (As Prepared) Rep. John Garamendi
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Thank you, Chairman Bergman.
This hearing, an annual fixture on the Readiness Subcommittee’s calendar, is an event of particular importance to the work we do, and also one that I often leave with a sense of frustration. This group of witnesses, all career civilians who have dedicated their working lives to providing support for our soldiers, sailors, airman, guardians and marines, likely shares some of my frustrations. Though you are too well prepared to express those thoughts, you know from firsthand experience what happens when we underfund facilities sustainment accounts or fail to make our installations resilient to energy disruptions or to natural disasters. You understand the cost in both monetary terms and in how a lack of foresight and planning impacts the mission. There are human costs related to cuts of these budget lines that otherwise appear sterile on a budget spreadsheet. Before I get into the substance of my remarks, I would like to thank you for your service. It is common practice for us to thank the admirals and generals who appear before us, but the career civilian workforce provides the backbone of our government agencies. In this time when the civilian workforce is under attack, I think it appropriate to recognize and publicly appreciate your service too, and to thank you for all you do for our country.
In the last two years, there has been a renewed focus on infrastructure sustainment, thanks to the good work of another set of professionals at GAO. We were aghast to see the poor conditions in which our service members live, and a wave of witnesses came before us pledging to make things better, telling us that our personnel were our most important resource. Yet, already, senior leaders are retreating from this position. To varying degrees, we’ve been told that the burden of sustaining our infrastructure, as is now required by statute, is just too much. That we can’t afford to dig ourselves out of the hole that the Department has created for itself. I disagree. The requirement that some find so offensive was a bipartisan, bicameral provision in last year’s NDAA, which set a minimum investment for facilities sustainment accounts. Last week, in our Readiness program update with the Vice Chiefs, the Air Force told us that this year would see a renewed focus on sustainment. I hope that vow extends to infrastructure.
What your comptrollers may see as a burden, I see as a moral obligation to the people who serve. We set a minimum requirement on investment in facilities not as a punishment, but because the military departments have proven to us year after year that you won’t do it on your own. The requirement was born out of years of frustration stemming from this very hearing. For years, your predecessors testified about the risk the leaders in the Department of Defense were willing to take in our infrastructure accounts. We’ve paid the costs when storms or earthquakes ravaged the Department’s buildings, often because they had been under-sustained, and the recapitalization projects that would have brought them up to modern building standards were deferred year after year. No more. Even with this measure, I suspect your maintenance backlogs continue to grow, but it’s a start.
Sadly, the neglect is not only in barracks and child development centers, it’s in infrastructure critical to operations; hangers, runway repair, and communication facilities, to name but a few examples. At the same time, we talk about our adversaries’ investments, we continue to ignore that investments in our installations are readiness enablers. This short-sightedness illustrates two areas that the Department continually ignores, addressing contested logistics risk, and maintaining its facilities. I’m tired of hearing the same narrative out of the Pentagon, and I don’t accept it.
What makes things worse is that even when Congress adds funds to ensure the adequacy of facilities sustainment accounts, the Department of Defense continues to see these accounts as a bill-payer. As recently as Monday, there was reporting that the administration is spending over $1.4 billion on the southwest border, a close examination of the budget execution documents associated with the FY25 full-year continuing resolution shows that over a billion of that came from Army facilities sustainment, restoration and modernization accounts. While there are reasonable questions about how we secure the border, taking money from the Army’s vital infrastructure accounts is not the way to do it. If this reporting is accurate, it is another example of selling out our service members and the lack of commitment to sustaining our infrastructure.
I understand that the witnesses before us today are cogs in a very big machine. You provide input, but the decisions are left to others. Fear not, I will address these issues again in other hearings with witnesses closer to the decision. That said, we rely on you to advocate for these programs, to use your years of experience to shape the narrative and to offer the best advice you can based in fact not ideology. The servicemembers rely on you to do that because in the end, it’s the men and women who serve who pay the cost of diminished readiness.
With that, I yield back Mr. Chairman.