[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 183 (Wednesday, December 16, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8694-S8697]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RUSSIAN ROCKET ENGINES POLICY PROVISION
Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I rise to call attention, sadly, to the
triumph of pork-barrel parochialism in this year's Omnibus
appropriations bill--in particular, a policy provision that was
airdropped into this bill, in direct contravention to the National
Defense Authorization Act, which will have U.S. taxpayers subsidize
Russian aggression and ``comrade'' capitalism.
Nearly 2 years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin, furious that
the Ukrainian people had ousted a pro-Moscow stooge, invaded Ukraine
and annexed Crimea. It is the first time since the days of Hitler and
Stalin that brute force has been projected across an internationally
recognized border to dismember a sovereign state on the European
Continent. More than 8,000 people have died in this conflict, including
298 innocent people aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 who were
murdered by Vladimir Putin's loyal supporters with weapons that
Vladimir Putin had supplied them.
Putin's imperialist campaign in Eastern Europe forced a recognition,
for anyone who was not yet convinced, that we are confronting a
challenge that many had assumed was resigned to the history books: a
strong, militarily capable Russian Government that is hostile to our
interests and our values and seeks to challenge the international order
that American leaders of both parties have sought to maintain since the
end of World War II.
That is why the Congress imposed tough sanctions against Russia,
especially against Putin's cronies and their enormously corrupt
business empire. As part of that effort, Congress passed the National
Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2015, which restricted the Air
Force from using Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines for national
security space launches--engines that are manufactured by a Russian
company controlled by some of Putin's top cronies. We did so not only
because our Nation should not rely on Russia to access space but
because it is simply immoral to help subsidize Russia's intervention in
Ukraine and line the pockets of Putin's gang of thugs who profit from
the sale of Russian rocket engines.
Last year the Defense authorization bill exempted five of the engines
that United Launch Alliance purchased before the invasion of Ukraine.
This allowed ULA, the space launch company that for years has enjoyed a
monopoly on launching military satellites, to use those Russian rocket
engines if the Secretary of Defense determined it was necessitated by
national security.
Since the passage of the act in the Senate 89 to 11, Russia has
continued--as we all know--to destabilize Ukraine and menace our NATO
allies in Europe with aggressive military behavior. Putin has sent
advanced weapons to Iran, violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Force Treaty. In a profound echo of the Cold War, Russia has intervened
militarily in Syria on behalf of the murderous regime of Bashar Assad.
Clearly, Russian behavior has only gotten worse.
That is why a few weeks ago Congress acted again and passed the
National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2016. The NDAA
authorized $300 million in security assistance and intelligence support
for Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. At the same time, the bill
recognized that a small number of Russian engines could be needed--
could be needed to maintain competition in the National Security Space
Launch Program and facilitate a smooth transition to rockets with
engines made in the United States. Therefore, the legislation allowed
ULA to use a total of nine Russian engines. The fiscal year 2016
Defense authorization bill, including its provision limiting the use of
Russian rocket engines, was debated for months. For months the issue
was debated. The Committee on Armed Services had a vigorous debate on
this important issue. An amendment was offered to maintain the
restriction on the Air Force's use of Russian rocket engines. In a
positive vote of the committee, the amendment was adopted.
We then considered hundreds of amendments to this bill on the Senate
floor over a period of 2 weeks. For 2 weeks we literally considered
hundreds of amendments, and we did so transparently, with an open
process which was a credit, frankly, to both sides. There was not one
amendment that was called up to change the provision of that
authorization bill concerning the RD-180 rocket engines. The
legislation passed with 71 votes.
Then, because of a misguided Presidential veto, this defense
legislation was actually considered a second time on the floor and it
passed 91 to 3. I want to reemphasize, one of the things I was proud of
for years is that we do debate the Senate Armed Services national
defense authorization bill. We have done so every year for some 43
years, and passed it, and had the President sign it. We open it to all
amendments, but there was no amendment on rocket engines proposed on
the floor of the Senate. Why wasn't it? If there were Members of the
Senate who did not like the provisions in the bill, we had an open
process to amend it, but they didn't. They didn't because they knew
they could not pass an amendment that would remove that provision in
the Defense Authorization Act. So now in the dead of night we just
found out, hours before we are supposed to vote, that they put in a
restriction which dramatically changes that provision that was done in
an open and transparent process. To their everlasting shame, in the
dark of night, not
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a vote--not a vote--no one consulted on the Armed Services Committee.
The fiscal year 2016 bill, including its provision limiting the use
of Russian rocket engines, was debated for months. The committee had a
vigorous debate, as I mentioned. Here is my point. The Senate had this
debate. We had ample time and opportunity to have this debate. Through
months of this fulsome debate, no Senator came to the Senate floor to
make the case that we needed to buy more Russian rocket engines, no
Senator introduced an amendment on the floor to lift the restriction on
buying more Russian rocket engines. To the contrary, the Senate and the
full Congress, including the House of Representatives, voted
overwhelmingly and repeatedly to maintain this restriction. This is a
policy issue, not a money issue--nowhere in the realm of the
Appropriations Committee. It was resolved, as it should have been, on
the defense policy bill.
Here we stand with a 2,000-page Omnibus appropriations bill crafted
in secret. Members outside of the Appropriations Committee were not
brought into the formulation of this legislation. There was no debate.
Most of us are seeing this bill for the first time this morning, and
buried within it is a policy provision that would effectively allow
unlimited purchases and use of--guess what--Russian rocket engines.
What is going on here? ULA wants more Russian engines, plain and
simple. That is why ULA recently asked the Defense Department to waive
the NDAA's previous restriction on the basis of national security and
let it use a Russian engine for the first competitive national security
space launch. The Defense Department declined.
So what did ULA do when it couldn't get its way? It manufactured a
crisis. Though the Department of Defense is restricted in using these
Russian rocket engines, there is no similar restriction on NASA or
commercial space launches. So ULA rushed to assign the RD-180s--the
rocket engines--that it had in its inventory to these nonnational
security launches, despite the fact that there is no restriction on the
use of Russian engines for those launches. This artificial crisis has
now been seized on by ULA's Capitol Hill leading sponsors; namely, the
senior Senator from Alabama, Senator Shelby, and the senior Senator
from Illinois, Senator Durbin, to overturn the NDAA's restriction, and
that is exactly what they have done--again, secretly, nontransparently,
as part of this massive 2,000-page Omnibus appropriations bill.
As I said, neither Senator Shelby nor Senator Durbin, nor any other
Senator, raised objections to the provisions of the bill or offered any
alternative during the authorization process on the Senate floor. That
is a repudiation of the rights of every single Senator in this body who
is not a Member of the Appropriations Committee.
In fact, as I have said, when this issue was debated and voted on in
the Committee on Armed Services, the authorizing committee of
jurisdiction voted in favor of maintaining the restriction. Instead, my
colleagues on the Appropriations Committee crafted a provision in
secret, with no debate, to overturn the will of the Senate as expressed
in two National Defense Authorization Acts. The result will enable a
monopolistic corporation to send potentially hundreds of millions of
dollars to Vladimir Putin and his corrupt cronies and deepen America's
reliance on these thugs for our military's access to space.
This is outrageous and it is shameful. It is the height of hypocrisy,
especially from my colleagues who claim to care about the plight of
Ukraine and the need to punish Russia for its aggression.
How can our government tell European countries and governments that
they need to hold the line on maintaining sanctions on Russia, which is
far harder for them to do than for us, when we are getting our own
policy in this way? We are gutting our own policy. How can we tell our
French allies, in particular, that they should not sell Vladimir Putin
amphibious assault ships, as we have, and then turn around and try to
buy rocket engines from Putin's cronies? Again, this is the height of
hypocrisy. Since March of 2014, my colleagues in the Senate have tried
to do everything we can to give our friends in Ukraine the tools they
need to defend themselves and their country from Russian aggression.
Rather than furthering that noble cause, Senator Shelby and Senator
Durbin have chosen to reward Vladimir Putin and his cronies with a
windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars.
A rocket factory in Alabama may benefit from this provision. Boeing,
headquartered in Illinois, may benefit from this decision. But have no
doubt, the real winners today are Vladimir Putin and his gang of thugs
running the Russian military industrial complex. I wish that Senator
Shelby and Senator Durbin would explain to the American taxpayer
exactly whom we are doing business with. They will not. But my
colleagues need to know.
Let me explain. At least one news organization has investigated how
much the Air Force pays for these RD-180 rocket engines, how much the
Russians receive, and whether members of the elite in Putin's Russia
have secretly profited by inflating the price. In an investigative
series entitled ``Comrade Capitalism,'' Reuters exposed the role that
senior Russian politicians and Putin's close friends, including persons
sanctioned over Ukraine, have played in the company called NPO
Energomash, which manufactures the RD-180. According to Reuters, a
Russian audit of that company found that it had been operating at a
loss because funds were, ``being captured by unnamed offshore
intermediary companies.''
In addition, the Reuters investigation also reported that NPO
Energomash sells its rocket engines to ULA through another company
called RD Amross, a tiny five-person outfit that stood to collect about
$93 million in cost markups under a multiyear deal to supply these
engines. The Defense Contract Management Agency found that in one
contract alone, RD Amross did ``no or negligible'' work but still
collected $80 million in ``unallowable excessive pass-through
charges.''
Now, remember my friends, that is a five-person outfit--five persons.
The Defense Contract Management Agency found that in one contract they
collected $80 million in unallowable, excessive passthrough charges. My
friends, thanks to this amendment, that is who is going to continue to
receive this money.
According to University of Baltimore School of Law professor Charles
Tiefer, who reviewed Reuters documents, ``The bottom line is that the
joint venture between the Russians and Americans is taking us to the
cleaners.'' He said that he had reviewed Pentagon audits critical of
Iraq war contracts, but those ``didn't come anywhere near to how
strongly negative'' the RD Amross audit was.
My colleagues, we have to do better. We have to do better than this.
Some may say that we need to buy rocket engines from Putin's cronies in
Russia. In particular, they will cite a letter from the Department of
Defense, in response to a list of leading questions from the
Appropriations Committee just a few days ago, which they will claim as
confirmation that the Department believes the United States will not
have a domestically manufactured replacement engine for defense space
launches before 2022.
Of course, that is nonsense. When the Department of Defense starts
making predictions beyond its 5-year budget plan, what I hear is ``This
isn't a priority'' or ``We don't really know.'' Either way, this is
unacceptable. Both the authorizers and the appropriators have ramped up
funding for the development of a new domestically manufactured engine.
The Pentagon needs to do what it has failed to do for 8 years: Make
this a priority.
Indeed, American companies have already said that they could have a
replacement engine ready before 2022. Our money and attention should be
focused on meeting this goal, not on subsidizing Putin's defense
industry. Proponents of more Russian rocket engines will also cite
claims by the Air Force that ULA needs at least 18 RD-180 engines to
create a bridge between now and 2022 when a domestically manufactured
engine becomes available. This, too, is false.
Today, we have two space launch providers--ULA and SpaceX--that, no
matter what happens with the Russian RD-180, will be able to provide
fully redundant capabilities with ULA's Delta IV and SpaceX's Falcon 9
and, eventually, the Falcon Heavy space launch
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vehicles. There will be no capability gap. The Atlas V is not going
anywhere anytime soon. ULA has enough Atlas Vs to get them through at
least 2019, if not later. As I alluded a moment ago, the Pentagon
agrees that no action is required today to address a risk for assured
access to space.
In declining ULA's recent request for a waiver from the Defense
authorization bill's restriction, the Deputy Secretary of Defense
concluded that they ``do not believe any immediate action is required
to address the further risk of having only one source of space launch
services.'' Indeed, in its recent letter, the Department of Defense
even confirmed that ULA has enough engines to compete for each of the
nine upcoming competitions and that the number they will pursue is
``dependent upon ULA's business management strategy.''
So I ask Senator Shelby and Senator Durbin: What are your priorities?
As we speak, Ukrainians are resisting Russian aggression and fighting
to keep their country whole and free. Yet this Omnibus appropriations
bill sends hundreds of millions of dollars to Vladimir Putin, his
cronies, and Russia's military industrial base as Russia continues to
occupy Crimea and to destabilize Ukraine and their neighbors in the
region. What kind of message does that send to Ukrainians who have been
fighting and dying to protect their country? How can we do this when
Putin is menacing our NATO allies in Europe? How can we do this when
Russia continues to send weapons to Iran? How can we do this when Putin
continues to violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty?
How can we do this when Putin is bombing U.S.-backed forces in Syria
fighting the murderous Assad regime?
I understand that some constituents of Senator Shelby and Senator
Durbin believe they would benefit from this provision, but as the New
York Times editorial board stated earlier this year:
When sanctions are necessary, the countries that impose
them must be willing to pay a cost, too. After leaning on
France to cancel the sale of two ships to Russia because of
the invasion of Ukraine, the United States can hardly insist
on continuing to buy national security hardware from one of
Mr. Putin's cronies.
I repeat; that is from the New York Times, an editorial dated June 5,
2015, titled ``Don't Back Down on Russian Sanctions.'' I also refer to
an article from Reuters, dated November 18, 2014, titled ``In murky
Pentagon deal with Russia, big profit for a tiny Florida firm.''
On the record, I make this promise: If this language undermining the
National Defense Authorization Act is not removed from the omnibus, I
assure my colleagues that this issue will not go unaddressed in the
fiscal year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Up to this point,
we have sought to manage this issue on an annual basis. We have always
maintained that if a genuine crisis emerged, we would not compromise
our national security interests in space. We have sought to be flexible
and open to new information. But if this is how our efforts are repaid,
then perhaps we need to look at a complete and indefinite restriction
on Putin's rocket engine.
I take no pleasure in saying that. I believe that avoiding the year-
over-year conflict over this matter between our authorizing and
Appropriations Committees is in our Nation's best interests. Such back-
and-forth only delays our shared desire to end our reliance on Russian
technology from our space launch supply chain, while injecting
instability into our national security space launch program.
That instability threatens the reliable launch of our most sensitive
national security satellites and the stability of the fragile
industrial base that supports them. But I cannot allow--I cannot allow
the Appropriations Committee or any other Member of this body to craft
a ``take it or leave it'' omnibus spending bill that allows a
monopolistic corporation to do business with Russia's oligarchs to buy
overpriced rocket engines that fund Russia's belligerence in Crimea and
Ukraine, its support for Assad in Syria, and its neoimperial ambitions.
I would like to address this issue in a larger context. The way the
Congress is supposed to work is that authorizing committees authorize,
whether it be in domestic or international or, in this case, defense
programs. The responsibility of the authorizing committee is to make
sure, in the case of defense--the training, equipping, the authorizing,
the funding, the policies--that all falls under the Armed Services
Committee.
The Appropriations Committee is required in their responsibilities to
decide the funding for these programs. It is within their authority to
zero out a program if they do not think the funding is called for or
necessary. They can add funding if they want to for various programs.
But this--this is a complete violation, a complete and total violation.
This issue was raised in the subcommittee and addressed in the
subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. It was in the full
committee. It was addressed on the floor where there were hundreds of
amendments that were proposed. Yet what was decided by the Armed
Services Committee remained intact until, in the dark of the night,
until 10 or 11 or 12 or whatever time it was this morning, up pops a
direct contradiction, a direct dismembering, a direct cancellation of a
provision in the law where we are talking about hundreds of millions of
dollars that have no bearing whatsoever on the authority and
responsibility of the Appropriations Committee.
So there are two problems here: One, it was done in the dark of
night--in the middle of the night. No one knew. Second of all, it is in
direct violation of the relationship between the authorizing committees
and the Appropriations Committee. So I say to my colleagues who are not
on the Appropriations Committee: If you let this go, then maybe you are
next. Maybe it is an amendment or a program that you have supported
through debate and discussion and authorizing the committee and votes
on amendments on the floor of the Senate. Then in the middle of the
night, in December, when we are going out of session in 48 hours or
so--or 72 hours--then up pops a provision that negates the entire work
of the authorizing committee over days and weeks and months.
I say to my colleagues: You could be next. You could be next. That is
why this in itself--subsidizing Vladimir Putin--is outrageous enough.
But if we are going to allow this kind of middle-of-the-night
airdropping, fundamental changes in programs and proposals and policies
that have been debated in the open, that have been voted on in the
open, completely negated, then we are destroying the very fundamental
structure of how the Senate and the Congress are supposed to work.
I ask unanimous consent that a letter I sent to the chairman of the
Appropriations Committee, dated November 19, 2015, be printed in the
Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, November 19, 2015.
Hon. Thad Cochran,
Chairman, Committee on Appropriations,
Washington, DC.
Dear Chairman Cochran: As you finalize the appropriations
bills for fiscal year 2016, I am concerned to hear that your
Committee may be considering authorization language that
would undermine sanctions on Russian rocket engines in
connection with the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV)
program, as approved in the recently enacted Fiscal Year 2016
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on November 10,
2015, by a vote of 91-3. That provision, which was reviewed
at length by the Armed Services Committee and subject to a
fulsome amendment process on the Senate Floor, achieves a
delicate balance that facilitates competition by allowing for
nine Russian rocket engines to be used as the incumbent space
launch provider transitions its launch vehicles to non-
Russian propulsion systems.
I know you share my concerns about our continued use of
Russian rocket engines in connection with military space
launch and I ask you to respect the well-informed work my
Committee took in crafting our legislation. Recent attempts
by the incumbent contractor to manufacture a crisis by
prematurely diminishing its stockpile of engines purchased
prior to the Russian invasion of Crimea should be viewed with
skepticism and scrutinized heavily. Such efforts should not
be misconstrued as a compelling reason to undermine any
sanctions on Russia while they occupy Crimea, destabilize
Ukraine, bolster Assad in Syria, send weapons to Iran, and
violate the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
We welcome your Committee's views and look forward to
working with your Committee on ensuring that Department of
Defense resources are not unwisely allocated to
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benefit the Russian military industrial base or its
beneficiaries. I believe avoiding the year-over-year re-
litigation of this matter between our authorizing and
appropriations committees is in our best interest, inasmuch
as such back-and-forth only delay our shared desire to
eliminate Russian technology from our space launch supply
chain and injects instability into the EELV program--not
conducive to its success in ensuring the reliable launch of
our most sensitive national security satellites or the
stability of the fragile industrial base that supports them.
Thank you for consideration of this important issue.
Sincerely,
John McCain,
Chairman.
Mr. McCAIN. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Ernst). The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. FRANKEN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 15
minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
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