[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 93 (Tuesday, June 4, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H4302-H4305]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            SOCIAL SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Florida 
bringing to the floor an extremely important issue: the way in which 
China is removing the civil liberties.
  Tonight, I do want to talk about America and some of the things that 
are going on within our own country.
  When I do these floor sessions, I always want to start with some 
sense of value and purpose, so I usually begin with this quote from 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I think it pretty much describes--not 
pretty much. It definitely describes how I view my job and how I view 
what I would hope would be the work of the Congress of the United 
States.
  So here is his quote: ``The test of our progress is not whether we 
add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we 
provide enough for those who have too little.''
  This statement of value really flows down through much of what we do 
here. We make a choice almost every day in ways that are very direct, 
for example, when we talk about Social Security, or indirect when we 
talk about war and peace. In the case of war, men and women who die are 
generally those who have little, not those who have much.
  So I want to keep this in mind, and I want to talk about several 
pieces of legislation that we are working on right now. I want to talk 
about seniors.
  Now, way back when Franklin Roosevelt established the Social Security 
system in the height of the Great Depression, Social Security was a 
pension system. Over the years, it has become the foundation for the 
support of retired men and women.
  Over the years, because of the way Social Security is structured, the 
inflation set up in Social Security does not keep pace with the normal 
expenses that a senior has, which is really much different than the 
general inflation rate for the Nation.
  I have introduced a piece of legislation, H.R. 1553, known as the 
Fair COLA for Seniors Act.
  Now, COLA is the cost-of-living adjustment. What we want to do is to 
make it fair for seniors so that we can honor the value that Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt stated so clearly for those who have the least, and 
generally that is the senior population.
  So what we want to do is to adjust the COLA to reflect the real 
expenses that a senior has. They are going to have far more medical 
expenses, some of it covered by Medicare, but a lot of it not, out-of-
pocket costs--we want to do that--housing and other kinds of 
transportation issues and the like.
  So this would be an adjustment to the COLA and provide a modest, very 
small, modest increase that, over time, would generate a substantial 
improvement for the benefits that seniors receive from their Social 
Security benefits.

                              {time}  2000

  Another group that we ought to be paying attention to, if we are 
looking at what Franklin Delano Roosevelt has said should be the test 
of our progress, is what we are doing for those who have little.
  Focus for a moment on students in America. Maybe it is a grandchild, 
a child, or an adult. If we take a look at the students in America 
today, not those who went to school when I did decades ago but, rather, 
students in school today, they are expected to borrow money to pay for 
their education.
  It used to be that higher education was a public benefit, not a 
private benefit, a public benefit supported by the taxpayers of America 
because the American public understood that if we had a well-educated 
workforce, not only high school but through the college years, we would 
have good, strong economic growth, and we would all be much better off.
  Those days when education was a public benefit have long been 
forgotten. Now it is perceived to be a private benefit to be paid for 
by the individual who is fortunate enough to go on to college.
  They do go, and right now, students who have gone to college in the 
past and students who are still in college today have accumulated $1.5 
trillion of student loan debt.
  Over $875 billion is owed to the Federal Government through the 
various Federal loan programs. And guess what? The interest rate 
averages over 4\1/2\ percent, 4\1/2\ percent at the very same time that 
the Federal Government is borrowing that money to then loan to the 
students.
  I looked at it this morning. The 10-year Treasury rate, which is the 
borrowing rate for the Federal Government, is right around 2 percent. 
The 30-year rate is just under 3 percent, if I recall correctly, 2.8 
percent.
  The Federal Government is doing an arbitrage here. It is borrowing at 
2 percent and loaning at 6 percent. We are making money on the backs of 
the students.
  What is the effect of that? The effect of that is that a student 
cannot engage in the normal economic activity of their parents where 
they are able to buy a car, go on vacation, buy a house, raise a 
family, begin a family. They are burdened by student loans.
  Here is what we are proposing in H.R. 1899, the Student Loan 
Refinancing and Recalculation Act. This would simply say that the 
Federal Government will refinance student loans at a rate that is about 
1 percent above the rate at which the Federal Government is able to 
borrow the money.
  Right now, instead of 6 percent on a 10-year loan, it would be 3 
percent. That is a lot of money. That is a lot of interest. It is not 
necessary for the Federal Government to do that. This is the Student 
Loan Refinancing and Recalculation Act.
  Undoubtedly, the parents of the students are able to refinance their 
home, refinance their mortgage. Who amongst us who owns a home has not 
refinanced that home? Most have as the interest rates have fallen. As I 
say, the interest rates for the Federal Government 10-year loan or 10-
year note is now about 2 percent.
  Here we go. We think H.R. 1899 is a good thing. If we can reduce that 
interest rate to the students, they will be able to pay off their loans 
faster. By the way, the same policy would apply to new loans not at 6 
percent but at the going rate for the Federal Government plus 1 
percent.
  That is H.R. 1899, which I think fits very directly with what 
Franklin Roosevelt said should be our purpose.
  We have several other bills that I have introduced, and I am going to 
go through some of them rather quickly here.
  I want to take up another one that really deals with a very special 
problem. I think I have put this board up before. That is Oroville Dam 
3 years ago. The Oroville Dam is the highest dam in the United States, 
over 700 feet.
  It rains in California. Sometimes, we have a drought. Sometimes, we 
have rain. Sometimes, when we have rain, we get too much rain.
  This is the spillway at Oroville Dam that failed. If the rain had 
continued

[[Page H4303]]

for another hour or so, the emergency spillway on that side was about 
to be--in fact, it was overtopped. It was beginning to erode beneath 
the foundation for the emergency spillway.
  That is a 17-foot high spillway. If that had gone, if the flood had 
continued, if the rain had continued for another hour or 2, that 
erosion would have undercut that emergency spillway, that wall, sending 
a 17-foot cascade down into the Feather River.
  I represent the downstream of the Feather River, and I know that as a 
result of this, 200,000 people had to evacuate in communities 
downstream, the communities of Yuba City and Marysville and other 
communities in the area, Live Oak and Gridley--200,000 people.
  Where did they go? They went onto a two-lane road, and the backup was 
hours and hours. Had this thing broken, there is no way that they could 
have escaped.
  I am going to put up another picture. This one is more recent. This 
is last year, 2018. This is Paradise, California. At one point, the 
people there thought they did live in paradise. Then there was a fire, 
and they lived not in paradise but in hell. The largest death toll of 
any fire in California occurred a year ago in Paradise, California.
  We can see some of the remnants here. People couldn't escape. A two-
lane road out of town and traffic jams, so people had to get out of 
their cars and run for their lives. Many couldn't run fast enough. 
Lives were lost.
  Here on the East Coast, there are vulnerable areas, for example, Cape 
Cod with one road in, one road out, a two-lane road.
  What we have done here as a result of these issues, Marysville, 
Paradise fire, Yuba City, in my district, the supervisors in Yuba 
County and Sutter County downstream from the Oroville Dam came to me 
and said we have to do something. We have to do something about the 
escape routes. We have to have better escape routes. We have to have 
signage. We have to have other kinds of control. We have to make it so 
that people can pull off the road if they have a flat tire and the 
like.

  At the very same time, my friends from Massachusetts, my colleagues 
here in Congress, Congressman Bill Keating and Senator Ed Markey, knew 
that they had the very same problem in Massachusetts, in Cape Cod.
  Last year, we introduced legislation, and we reintroduced it this 
year. Here in the House, we call it H.R. 2838, the ESCAPE Act, the 
Enhancing the Strength and Capacity of America's Primary Evacuation 
Routes Act. This would give communities across the Nation an 
opportunity to go to the Federal Department of Transportation and put 
projects before it to receive grant money to improve escape routes in 
their communities.
  There are many communities around America that have one road in, one 
road out, two lanes or even fewer than that. We hope that this ESCAPE 
Act becomes part of the transportation infrastructure program that is 
now being discussed here in the Congress of the United States--H.R. 
2838, the ESCAPE Act, Enhancing the Strength and Capacity of America's 
Primary Evacuation Routes Act.
  We don't ever want to see this again. We don't want people to be 
trapped. We want to use the programs that the Federal Government can 
make available to assist communities in improving their escape routes, 
their emergency evacuation routes.
  There are three different pieces of legislation that I want to bring 
to the attention of the Congress.
  I have another one. I am on the Armed Services Committee. On the 
Armed Services Committee, we spend a lot of time looking at war, the 
materials that are needed for war, how the men and women are going to 
have the proper equipment.
  One of the things we have noticed over the years, and one might 
expect this--certainly, we should expect it--is that the men and women 
of our armed services are often in harm's way. Usually, we think of 
this about the kinds of things that occur with IEDs, improvised 
explosive devices, where some 4,200 Americans were killed in Iraq and 
similarly in Afghanistan.
  But there is another risk. It is deadly, and it is mostly not known 
at the time. What we want to do here, as we have studied the effects of 
war on the veterans who have returned, on the men and women who are out 
there, we have learned that whether they are in Afghanistan or Iraq or 
at the various bases here in the United States, they are often exposed 
to chemicals, mold, and other kinds of things that over time present 
themselves in serious health risks and serious health events.
  We know this. Think back to the Vietnam war and Agent Orange. It took 
more than 25 years for the veterans of the Vietnam war to be able to 
receive benefits for the injuries that they sustained because of Agent 
Orange being used in the Vietnam war. We don't want that to happen 
again, but we know it did.
  We know that in the first Iraq war in the 1990s, thousands of our 
soldiers were exposed to toxic fumes and smoke as the fires raged in 
the oil fields. During the period of time of occupation in Iraq in Iraq 
I and Iraq II, the military routinely disposed of chemicals of other 
kinds of materials in burn pits. Soldiers were exposed to those toxic 
chemicals.
  We call this the OATH Act, and this is H.R. 2617. It is known as the 
Service Member's Occupational and Environmental Transparency Health 
Act.
  What we want to do is when the men and women are in the field or on 
the bases here in the United States, when they are exposed to some sort 
of chemical contaminant, they would have in their medical records at 
that time that they had been exposed. That sometime in their work, in 
the tasks they were carrying out, they were exposed to these toxic 
materials in their normal work, that would go into their medical 
records.
  As they proceed through their careers in the military or leave the 
military and move on into the Veterans Administration, that information 
follows along with them so that there is always that data.
  Then someday in the future, when some occurrence happens, for 
example, cancer or some other illness happens that can be traced back 
to this exposure that took place years before, they will be able to 
receive the benefits and appropriate treatments without having to guess 
what happened. It is there in their records. It is part of their files. 
That will be available for them to be able to get appropriate medical 
care at some point in the future.
  That is H.R. 2617. It is called the OATH Act.
  I must say that this particular bill came from one of the members of 
the military who served as my military fellow, Stephanie Harley. She is 
a lieutenant colonel now, and she was an environmental engineer.
  As she worked with me last year, she said that there is an ongoing 
problem, that they do not have in their records the exposure that they 
have had to some toxic chemical or toxic environment during their days 
of service.
  She said there ought to be a law, and I agree. There ought to be a 
law. This is what she recommended, and I think it is going to pass. In 
fact, I think we are going to try to put it in this year's National 
Defense Authorization Act. We have strong support.
  We also know that Tulsi Gabbard, one of my colleagues here, has 
introduced a bill that fits very nicely with this. It deals 
specifically with the burn pits. This particular bill is much broader, 
and it fits very well with the work that she is doing on a very similar 
subject.
  These are just a couple of examples, and I want to deal with two 
more, if I might. It won't take too long, but I do want to put this up 
on the board here.
  Back to FDR, what are we doing for the least of our society? This is 
a pretty good example of where American policy has gone wrong.
  Last year, I served as the ranking member of the Coast Guard and 
Maritime Subcommittee. I have done that for the previous 7 years. We 
spent a lot of time worrying and thinking about the American merchant 
marine.
  These are the ships. The United States is a maritime state. No other 
country in the world has more ocean frontage than the United States. We 
have inland rivers that are extraordinarily important, the Ohio, the 
Mississippi, the Missouri, all of those, and out in California, the 
Sacramento River.
  What has happened? We used to have thousands of American flagships on 
which Americans would work as the

[[Page H4304]]

mariners, the sailors, the captains, the engineers, and the like.

                              {time}  2015

  But just take a snapshot. In the 1980s, we had 249 flagged American 
ships, built in America, manned and ``womanned'' by Americans. The 
mariners were Americans. And here we are now, this is actually 2016. We 
are down to 78 ships.
  This is a fundamental national security issue. We spend all of our 
time thinking about the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and we should. 
However, if you are going to go to war, you are going to need ships. 
And I don't think we can call up the Chinese and say: Hey, can you send 
us a couple of ships so that we can send our men and women off to the 
Pacific?
  It is a national security issue that we be able to transport our 
military on the ocean. More than 90 percent of it has to go by sea, not 
in the airplanes. We have got wonderful, large airplanes, and they are 
great, but if you are going to move a lot of equipment, you are going 
to need ships.
  So that is the state of it. We think we can do something about that.
  I am going to put up a couple of other charts here. Let's do this 
one.
  Next year, 2020, the U.S. is expected to be the world's third largest 
producer of liquefied natural gas for export. 225 LNG--liquefied 
natural gas--vessels, ships are expected to be added to the world fleet 
by 2020. But due to the eroded capacity of the American shipyards, none 
of these will be built in the United States.
  So it is not just the ability to move equipment around the world. The 
same thing happens with the oil that we will soon be exporting. The 
statistics are almost exactly the same.
  It is also about the jobs, the jobs in the American shipyard, good, 
well-paying, middle-class jobs that simply don't exist today because we 
are not building ships in the American shipyards.
  But if you happen to be in the Chinese shipyards, you have got a lot 
of work to do. Fifty of the vessels are going to be built in China. In 
Korea, 70 percent of these new ships are going to be built in Korea.
  How many in America right now? Zip, zero, none, nada.
  We can change that. We have a piece of legislation to do that, not 
yet introduced. It will be introduced in the days ahead. We call that 
the Energizing American Shipbuilding Act.
  If we are going to ship energy, export oil and gas, why don't we do 
it on American-built ships?
  Not all of it. We, frankly, don't have the capacity to build 200 
ships or 250, 300 ships. We just don't have the capacity.
  But what if we started with 5 percent? What if we said that 5 percent 
of the export of oil and gas--and America soon will be the third 
largest exporter of natural gas, and we are certainly exporting oil. 
What if we did that on American ships?
  This legislation, the Energizing American Shipbuilding Act, which we 
are going to introduce in the days ahead, probably next week or the 
week after--we will be introducing it with a bipartisan group.
  Senator Wicker in the Senate carried this bill last year, as I did 
here in the House. We didn't get it passed. We are making some 
progress. We hope to get it this year.
  What does it mean? Well, we can kind of see what it means up here. It 
means that we will be building about 50 ships over the next 15 years or 
so, LNG tankers and oil tankers.
  What does it mean? It means the shipyards will be busy. It means the 
steel yards or the steel factories in America will be busy. The 
manufacturers of pumps and engines and hydraulic systems and electronic 
systems will be busy.
  And, by the way, we will rebuild the American mariner base. Right 
now, TRANSCOM, responsible for moving all of the equipment for the 
Army, Navy, Air Force across and around the world, says that one of the 
key deficiencies in American security is we don't have the mariners to 
man the ships that we don't have. And the ships are aging out almost as 
fast as the mariners are retiring. So we can solve this problem with 
the Energizing American Shipbuilding Act.
  So I draw the attention of my colleagues to this legislation. We will 
have a number in a couple of weeks. Senator Wicker will have the bill 
on the other side, and we will carry forward and, hopefully, we will 
have our shipyards busy. We will have Americans working in the 
shipyards, Americans building big engines for these ships and the other 
kinds of equipment that are needed.
  At the same time, we will begin to rebuild the force of men and women 
who will be on those ships as they travel around the world carrying a 
very strategic national asset.
  Speaking of veterans, this is another piece of legislation that we 
are working on, and this one really, really touches me.
  This is a picture that we took 2 years ago. These three gentlemen 
were mariners. They were merchant mariners in World War II. These were 
the men who were on the ships that took the supplies to Europe, took 
the supplies to the Pacific so that America could fight in World War 
II. All three of these gentlemen were over 90 years of age.
  It took nearly 40 years before the Congress of the United States 
recognized that the mariners, the merchant mariners, were part of our 
military program. More than 40 years, they were on the outside. They 
were never, ever recognized as veterans, even though the merchant 
mariners in World War II had the highest death rate of any other 
service.
  We know about the bombers that bombed in Europe. We know that the 
casualties were extraordinary. We know that men and women lost their 
lives on ships of the Navy and, of course, in the battlefield, men in 
the Army.
  However, those men, just as these in this picture, had a higher death 
rate than any of those in the Army, Air Force, any of those in the Army 
serving wherever it may be, or the Marines or the Navy.
  It took a long, long time for us to recognize them as veterans and 
make veteran services available to them, but that was done about, I 
think, 40, 45 years after the war ended.
  And here we are. Here we are today, with just one more way to 
remember the extraordinary sacrifice that these men, most of whom are 
dead--in fact, earlier today I put a resolution across the floor on one 
of these gentlemen that died this last week.
  So we think they ought to be honored. We think we ought to honor them 
with a Congressional Gold Medal, and so we are now pursuing that. I 
think we are going to get it done. We tried last year. We came up 
short. The Senate adjourned before they would take it up last year.
  But we are going to give it a shot this year, and I think we are 
going to do it; and I think we need to do it, just as we needed, some 
years back, to make certain that they had veteran services available to 
them.
  Now we need to honor them one more time. For those few who are still 
alive, for those who have died, their family should know that the 
Congress of the United States recognizes the extraordinary sacrifice 
that was made by their colleagues.
  So this will be the Congressional Gold Medal Act, and we will have 
that out on the floor this next week, and we will be pushing it along. 
We need 290 signatures. Don't ask me why we need more than a majority 
just to present this. But anyway, those are the rules of the House, and 
we will follow the rules. We are at about 220 people.
  So now if you have some friends out there who you think are here in 
Congress and not paying attention to the gold medal for the merchant 
mariners of World War II, give them a holler and tell them to sign on. 
We will get it done this year and, hopefully, the Senate will work with 
us on it.
  A final point, and I will end with this in just a few moments, but I 
need a couple more pictures.
  In case you didn't notice, I love these pictures. I love to put them 
up here so that you are not just listening to me; you can see some of 
the things we talk about.
  So here is what I want to talk about: the U.S. military in the age of 
climate change.
  I became the chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee of the House 
Armed Services Committee, an incredible honor and, actually, a lot of 
work, very, very important work. That subcommittee is responsible for 
over 1,000 military installations all around the

[[Page H4305]]

world, responsible for the feeding and care of the military personnel--
Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines--their equipment.
  The purchases of new equipment is in another subcommittee, but once 
that equipment is purchased, is it ready to be used? Are the troops 
ready? Are they properly trained?
  And, as I said, we are responsible for the installations.
  We asked a question when I became chairman, and the question was 
this: Is the Department of Defense ready for the era of climate change? 
It turns out the answer is: Not really.
  Out there across America, there are thousands, tens of thousands of 
men and some women who served at Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps camp 
here on the East Coast, famous. It was hit by a hurricane last fall. 
The deluge went on for hours.
  The damage done at Camp Lejeune, trees falling, flooding occurring, 
roofs being blown off, leaking, water damage, hundreds of buildings 
seriously damaged and uninhabitable, could not be used, including the 
headquarters--Camp Lejeune.
  Next to it, Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, similar damage.
  It is estimated that here at Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point, more than 
$3 billion of damage has occurred that will have to be made up for in 
the days and weeks ahead.
  Now, you may think that was a wake-up call. Indeed, it should have 
been. However, the wake-up call was occurring just a few days earlier.
  That is a picture of Tyndall Air Force Base, a key Air Force base on 
the west coast of Florida in which our fighter bombers and fighter jets 
do their training, the new F-35, the F-22, all of them.
  This base, it was literally blown off the map. It is right on the 
edge of the Gulf. Hurricane came through--I think it was a 5 
hurricane--and literally blew this base off the map, obliterated major 
parts of the base.
  This is just one of perhaps 100 pictures I could put up.
  Is the military ready for climate change? Well, certainly not the 
Marines at Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point or the Air Force at Tyndall. 
This is probably a $4 billion fix-up to rebuild it. And I will tell you 
what we are going to do about it here after I put this up.
  This is actually 2019. You have heard of the Strategic Air Command. 
That is the bombers that carry our nuclear weapons. This is Offutt Air 
Force Base in the Midwest, underwater, the Missouri River, probably a 
billion dollars damage here.
  You say: Oh, that is just flooding. No, it is extreme flooding. 
Extreme weather events. Three bases critical, absolutely critical to 
the training and the readiness of our troops.
  I think the water has subsided, but the damage to the buildings has 
yet to be repaired--a billion here, $4 billion there, $3 billion there, 
and that is not all.
  We know that out in California we have had our fires. I just showed 
the Camp fire, but you may not know that Port Hueneme, the Naval base 
in Ventura County just north of Malibu, fire raged down the hill. They 
had to evacuate the homes for the servicemembers, and there we have it.

                              {time}  2030

  So we are looking at the new National Defense Authorization Act, and 
in that act writing in the following changes to the law, and that is 
that the U.S. military, in all of its future construction, will build 
to the maximum threat in that area, maybe a tornado, as it could have 
been in the Midwest, or a flood or a hurricane or a deluge or sea level 
rise or a fire out in the West. All future construction will be built 
to the maximum threat at that specific base. That is it.
  We are not going to build for yesterday and just go back and have 
another flood or build for yesterday at Tyndall and see the next 
hurricane come through and wipe it out one more time. We are not going 
to do that.
  At the same time, we are going to make sure that in that construction 
and in the improvements, that they maximize energy conservation.
  The single largest consumer of petroleum in this Nation is the U.S. 
military. It is expensive. We are spending a pile of money, billions of 
dollars on energy consumption in the military. We will emphasize energy 
conservation, things such as windows and insulation. And when we build 
new, we will build to the maximum standard for energy conservation, as 
well as for resiliency; that is going to be in the new National Defense 
Authorization Act. It is in the work of the Readiness Subcommittee. We 
are going to drive this, and I think we are going to drive it to 
success.
  And I will say, this is not all new. The military is aware that 
climate change is a threat, but they haven't been focused sufficiently, 
in part because we, the Congress of the United States, have not focused 
it and we have not said: In your construction, in your reconstruction, 
and in the upgrading of your facilities, you will build to the maximum 
threat that you face in that area. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, 
fires, floods, whatever it is, you must build to the maximum threat, so 
that you are resilient, so that you can come back to provide the 
necessary support that may be desperately needed.
  This is not just in the United States. There are major construction 
programs going on in Guam, out in the Pacific where we know there is 
going to be another typhoon, probably within the next 9 months. So 
those facilities also will be built for resiliency.
  So these are just a few of the things that we are working on. We have 
many, many others. We know that we can do better.
  We know that as we said with the words of FDR: ``The test of our 
progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have 
much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''
  That may be a senior on Social Security; it may be a young man or 
woman that wants to get an education and is paying a very high interest 
rate; it may be a military family that is living in a house somewhere 
across the United States or around the world, in a house that is owned 
by a contractor that is providing housing for the military that is not 
up-to-date, that is filled with mold or some other contaminant; it may 
be a military person that is exposed to some sort of toxic chemical or 
toxic smoke, we are going to make sure that we follow this advice. It 
is not for those who have much, it is for those who have too little, 
wherever they may be.
  That is our value, that is our goal.
  I appreciate the opportunity to share with everyone several pieces of 
legislation that I will be working on together with my colleagues here 
in the House of Representatives.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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