Opening Statement (As Delivered)
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman. … very much for your leadership.
I agree. It's been a very bipartisan effort between the chair, ranking member, all the members, and the staff to produce an excellent product that we have as the base bill and as the starting point. I think the chairman's emphasis has been right on point emphasizing acquisition reform. I sort of think of it as three big challenges we have.
One is to make sure that we support the service men and women and their families. We took a big swing at that last year, again, in a very bipartisan way. We put together a bill that I think is making a real difference. This bill enhances that.
Second, get after the innovation problem, the acquisition problem, how slowly the Pentagon moves to acquire the critical new technologies that we need. We've done some good work on that over the years. This bill represents the most comprehensive and effective swing at acquisition reform that I've seen in my almost 29 years here on the committee. The chairman did an outstanding job of bringing people together, having conversations over the course of the last year to prepare us, to get the text right and I think this bill is incredibly important because of acquisition reform.
The third big challenge is to get to capacity in terms of critical munitions, critical technologies that we need to make. We don't make as much as we should, whether you're talking about drones, basic artillery, different pieces of equipment, obviously the ship problems have been well documented. We still have a lot of work to do to get to the numbers that we need and to get to the manufacturing efficiency that we need, but I think this bill does a decent job of that as well.
The problems that I have are unrelated to what this committee has done, but when you look at the needs within national security, the other budget decisions that have been made by this administration and by this Congress really put us in incredibly deep hole. We just passed a budget bill that added another $3.5 trillion to the debt, cut a massive number of taxes—many of which are sunsetted by the way. So, we're going to come back and we're going to have the same argument about, “Oh my gosh, you can't increase taxes in two or three years.” So, we're going to lift those sunsets, drive ourselves even deeper in debt, put ourselves in a position where we cannot pay for the very national security needs that I know pretty much every member of this committee supports. I've used this line a number of times and I'm going to keep using it. If you believe in the importance of funding national security, of funding our troops, then you ought to be willing to pay for it. We can't just keep putting it on a credit card, which is what we're doing.
And then we also had in that bill $170 billion for border security—$170 billion to secure a border that according to the president, the same president who was asking for that $170 billion, is already secure. Which, by the way, I kind of agree with him. I think he was the one who said we don't need to change the law; we just need to change presidents. But apparently we need to change the law too if we're going to throw another $170 billion at it. And that undercuts our ability to meet our national security needs, particularly because they are also grabbing a lot of Department of Defense assets to use in that effort and undermining our ability to meet our national security needs.
In the last complaint I have, I’ll go back to Secretary Gates who made the comment, “If you're going to cut the State Department, you better give me more ammunition.” Well, we are absolutely gutting the State Department. We've shut down USAID. We've effectively shut down foreign aid. Now we're firing, I don’t know, sorry, I lose track of the numbers, and they change from day to day. So, it's in the thousands that we're firing from the State Department. So, we're gutting diplomacy, we're gutting development, we're spending all this money to secure a border that is already secure, and then throughout this hearing, … next month, next year, the next two years, we're going to hear from everyone saying, “Oh my God, we need more money for defense. We need more money for defense. How are we possibly going to meet our national security needs?” You’ve got to set priorities. The priorities set in the overall budget do not reflect the priorities that should be set, despite the best efforts of the leadership of this committee in the majority and elsewhere. So, I appreciate the bipartisan effort, I look forward to the debate and discussion—as always—and I yield back.