[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 65 (Wednesday, April 27, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2481-S2483]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     FUNDING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about why all of us 
are here. The primary role of Congress is to responsibly fund the 
Federal Government. To do that, we must set clear national priorities 
that we can financially support. All too often, the process of setting, 
and then sticking to these national priorities has become a purely 
political exercise, not a function of governing. It is the No. 1 
complaint I hear when I travel back to my home State of Georgia.
  Coming from the business world, I clearly see two interlocking crises 
we face as a country. First, we have a global security crisis. The 
world may be more dangerous right now than at any point in my lifetime. 
Interlocked with that is our national debt crisis that threatens the 
ability we have to defend our country today.
  As we begin the appropriations process, let's take an honest look at 
what we are appropriating for. One of our top national priorities is to 
provide for the national defense. It is one of only 6 reasons 13 
Colonies got together in the first place; that is, to provide for the 
national defense. However, under Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama, 
we saw three different periods of disinvestment in our military. Our 
30-year average of defense spending has been 4.2 percent of GDP. 
Following the Carter administration, the Reagan administration recapped 
the military. Then, we had another decline. You see the buildup in the 
surge in Afghanistan and Iraq, behind two wars.
  We have been at war for 15 years. I believe in many cases we have 
burnt out our equipment, and in cases we are beginning to do that with 
our personnel, with longer tours and more difficult assignments in this 
hybrid war we are facing today.
  Then you see under this administration a further decline, now to 3.1 
percent of GDP. This is the lowest point since the Vietnam War, and the 
irony of that is that we are still spending $600 billion of $4 trillion 
total spending of the Federal Government on our military. The irony is 
the 30-year average of 4.2 percent, which is a hundred basis points 
below what we're currently spending--that's almost $200 billion--in a 
$19 trillion economy.
  The question is how do we determine the priorities to keep a strong 
military? To make sure we can fulfill one of six reasons we came 
together as a country.
  We are about to have the smallest Army since World War II, the 
smallest Navy since World War I, and the smallest and oldest Air Force 
ever. How can this be? The world is more dangerous right now than at 
any time in my lifetime.
  We see increased aggression from traditional rivals, Russia and 
China. We also see the rise of ISIS, partly because of our own 
intransigence. They have to be stopped now, or we are going to have to 
deal with them later here. Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, ISIS--all of these 
threats are beginning to be interconnected and pose threats not just in 
the Middle East, but around the world.
  Finally, we have nuclear threats from rogue regimes, like North Korea 
and Iran, and emerging, game-changing technologies, such as cyber 
threats, which nations like Russia are using for hybrid warfare right 
now in Eastern Europe. There is an emerging arms race in space. This is 
why our women and men in uniform need to have the tools and resources 
to complete their missions around the world.
  This fiscal crisis is jeopardizing our ability to actually fund the 
missions being asked of our military today. Let me give two examples. 
JSTARS is a

[[Page S2482]]

fleet of planes, 16 in number. These planes in total have over 1 
million hours of service. They were used when the Air Force bought them 
to start with some 30 years ago. They were flown by commercial 
airlines, such as Air India and Pakistan Air, around the world. Today 
they fly missions providing critical intelligence, surveillance, and 
reconnaissance--ISR--ground targeting, and battlefield command and 
control capabilities to all branches of our military in multiple 
regions of the world. The problem is they have outlived their useful 
life and they are being replaced--or the theory was that they were 
going to be replaced. But because of our intransigence in Washington, 
the funding is not there to replace them. So we are now facing 
potentially 8 years where we will not be able to fulfill their mission.
  These are the planes that provide oversight for our men and women who 
are in harm's way--in Afghanistan, Iraq, in Southern Command, where we 
are intercepting drugs, in the Far East. Wherever the men and women in 
American uniforms are facing danger, JSTARS is there protecting them in 
ways no one else can in the military. All of these planes have to be 
replaced, and the sooner we get started, the better. They will not be 
able to fulfill their mission over the next 8 years.
  This chart shows the declining availability of the current fleet--
down to zero by 2023. It also shows that under the current plan, 
pending DOD approval and funding, the replacement fleet doesn't even 
start coming online until 2023--a start date that is now in jeopardy 
because of the current administration's budget request.

  JSTARS' recap is the No. 4 requisition priority for the Air Force, 
behind the long-range strike bomber, the new tanker, and the F-35. We 
are not going to be able to fulfill the mission of these airmen and 
soldiers over the next 8 years unless we do something about it right 
now--and even then, it might be too late.
  This is a picture of a 1957 Chevrolet. Some of you will remember what 
this is like. I remember this car. This is a collector's item. Some of 
my friends own this car. This car is of the same genre, same age as 
many of the airplanes we are now flying around the world. That is 
great, but imagine if you had to drive this car--this was your everyday 
car and you drove it to work every day back and forth; you depended on 
it to get you to work every morning and to get you home every night. 
What would you do if you had to drive it to the west coast and back 
every week? Imagine what the maintenance time loss would be for 
breakdown. Imagine what it would be like traveling those distances 
without all the modern conveniences, such as satellite radio--Sirius, 
Pandora. What about the safety factor? These are antiques. The point is 
that this is a direct analogy of what we are doing with our military 
today in a very dangerous world. That sounds ridiculous, but you know 
we have another example, and that is our marines around the world, who 
are the first to hit a crisis.
  In Moron, Spain, we have a contingent of marines and one of their 
missions is to protect our embassies in Africa. Post-Benghazi, that 
takes on a new level of importance. These marines do a great job. They 
are the very best of what we have in America. They are ready to go. The 
problem is that because of budget constraints, their fleet of 
airplanes, the V-22 Ospreys, is getting cut in half, and that 
fundamentally cuts their ability to complete their mission in half. So 
they will not be able to fulfill the mission they have today the way 
they are supposed to because of our own intransigence.
  So, what is causing this great disinvestment in our military? Well, 
there is only one answer: the national debt. These two crises interlock 
in a way they never have before. It used to be that defense hawks and 
budget hawks were separate people. Today, I am living proof that they 
can embody themselves in the same person, because I am both. We have to 
be. We no longer have the luxury of debating both issues separately.
  In the past 7 years, Washington has spent $25 trillion running the 
Federal Government. That is bad enough, but the problem is that we 
borrowed $9 trillion of that $25 trillion. That is 35 percent. The 
Congressional Budget Office says that over the next 10 years we will 
borrow 30 percent of that. What that means and why that is important is 
that fundamentally, all of our mandatory spending--some $3 trillion--is 
mandatory, so our first dollars go to that. The problem is that all of 
our discretionary spending--all of USAID, our foreign programs, and our 
expenditures--are fundamentally borrowed under that scenario, and that 
is where we are today. Can you imagine that? With this level of 
borrowing, every dime we spend on foreign aid--I just want to 
reiterate--foreign aid, domestic programs, and military--we are 
borrowing that money today because we haven't faced up to this crisis.
  First we have the period here under President Bush. In 2000 our debt 
was $6 trillion. We added $4 trillion on the back of two wars. In 2008, 
we had $10 trillion in debt. Now we see we have another $9 trillion in 
the last 7 years. We will be close to $20 trillion by the time we are 
through.
  The yellow here is what the Congressional Budget Office says we are 
about to face. If we do nothing from today, we will add another $9 
trillion to this Federal debt--close to $30 trillion.
  I am a business guy and I know the capital markets are under great 
stress today. The danger of this is this is totally unmanageable. If 
interest rates were to reach their 50-year average of just 5.5 percent, 
we would be paying $1 trillion in interest on a $4 trillion total 
budget. There is no way that is possible. That is about twice the 
amount we spend on our military.
  Our debt crisis is directly impacting our ability to protect our 
Nation and project power around the world. This puts in jeopardy our 
very ability to deal with global threats as they come up every day, and 
believe me, they are coming up every day. Without a strong economy, 
without dealing with our debt crisis right now, we can't adequately 
fund our military to confront the growing threats we face. That is a 
fact.
  It used to be that fiscal hawks and defense hawks, and I have said 
this, but today I see that more and more people who are one or the 
other are beginning to come together and recognize the other problem. 
They are interrelated in a way they have never been.
  Believe me, we need a strong defense. I believe we need to be 
responsible for our Federal finances and the needs of our people here 
at home. The safety net needs to be maintained. Social Security needs 
to be saved. These are things we can't ignore, but we have to start 
dealing with our priorities today. That is why we have to find a way to 
come together--Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, whatever--and 
make sure we protect our economic and our national security priorities. 
We need to get in a room and iron this out. They are not that 
complicated. We can find the solutions.
  As former Admiral Mike Mullen said in 2012, ``I believe that our debt 
is the greatest threat to our national security. If we as a country do 
not address our fiscal imbalances in the near-term, our national power 
will erode.''
  That was 5 years ago, and what have we done since then? Nothing but 
add debt.
  Last year, Congress passed a budget resolution. We laid out a 
conservative vision for what spending levels we should undertake and 
cut $7 trillion from the President's budget. We passed a budget, but 
because our budget process is broken, we didn't pass most 
authorizations. We passed appropriations in committees, but we weren't 
able to get them to the floor and vote on them. So we ended up with a 
CR at the end of the year, and that led to a grand bargain, which I 
opposed, and an omnibus that added some $9 trillion to our national 
debt. That was used to fund the government, in the absence of any 
appropriations bills having been approved. That pushed us to a first-
quarter omnibus that really most of us wanted to avoid. At the end of 
that, eight people got in a room over a weekend and decided how we are 
going to spend $4 trillion. That is not what our Founders had in mind. 
That means that the topline spending levels were set by a so-called 
grand bargain, which I voted against, because it increased spending and 
would add over $9.5 trillion over the next decade to our national debt.
  This mounting debt crisis will not fix itself--quite the contrary. It 
will only

[[Page S2483]]

grow worse because Social Security and Medicare are going to demand 
more and more funds from the general operating fund because of the 
imbalances in those two items. If we don't get serious about solving 
this debt crisis right now, we will not be able to fully support our 
national security and our domestic priorities.
  Recently, Richard Haass, a former top State Department official, said 
in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, ``Our inability to 
deal with our debt challenge will detract from the appeal of the 
American political and economic model'' as we try to influence young 
democracies around the world. He continued: ``The result will be a 
world that is less democratic and increasingly less deferential to U.S. 
concerns in matters of security.''

  We must create restraint and fiscal sanity in Washington. In the 
private sector, you fix a business by first drilling down and finding 
the underlying problem. The way that Washington funds the Federal 
Government, the time it takes to complete the federal budget, and the 
fact that the current process allows Members of Congress to put off 
making tough decisions are the real problem. In business, this would 
never be allowed. In your personal home, this cannot be tolerated, but 
somehow we are able to do it here year after year. This process has 
only worked four times in the past 42 years.
  It has been encouraging to hear the Senate Budget Committee chairman, 
Senator Mike Enzi, and the House Budget chairman, Congressman Tom Price 
from my home State of Georgia, make this a priority for this year. I 
believe they are making great progress. Both are having hearings to 
find out if there are models around the world that do it better than we 
do. We are finding those examples, especially at a time when we cannot 
allow the process to break down and result in more continuing 
resolutions, omnibus bills, or short-term funding fights that don't 
solve anything.
  We must also reduce redundant programs, roll back the regulatory 
regime, and focus on growing our economy through overhauling our 
archaic Tax Code, and unlocking, finally, our Nation's full economic 
and energy potential.
  Finally, we have to save Social Security and Medicare and tackle the 
biggest problems of our overall health care costs. To do this, 
Washington needs to stop pretending that these crises will go away on 
their own and that the national debt will somehow solve itself. It 
won't. In fact, it has already done irreversible damage to our 
credibility and capability on the world stage. Our mounting debt crisis 
is already raising questions from our allies around the world about how 
we will be able to stand by our international commitments.
  I just got back from a trip to Europe and the Middle East. The No. 1 
point raised to us by leaders, heads of state in those countries, was 
that America needs to lead again. To lead again, we need to get our 
financial house in order.
  Our debt crisis and a failed foreign policy has served to confuse our 
allies and embolden our enemies. It threatens our ability to defend our 
country, period. Also, the interest payments on our debt is affecting 
our education, infrastructure, and more--here at home in the programs 
that are necessary. Imagine if we didn't have that unproductive 
responsibility of unnecessary interest. Every Member of this body knows 
we need to act now.
  My question is, why aren't we acting? The challenge is to stop 
talking about it theoretically and start putting solutions into 
practice. That is why Georgians sent me to the U.S. Senate, and that is 
why I will continue fighting on this every day.
  Let's not lose sight of Congress's No. 1 responsibility. We are 
charged in the Constitution under article I to responsibly fund the 
Federal Government and to ensure that the 6 reasons why 13 Colonies got 
together in the first place can actually be realized.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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