[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 191 (Thursday, December 8, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7061-S7063]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                   National Defense Authorization Act

  Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, $847 billion is a lot of money to spend 
on anything in 1 year, even in Washington terms. It is enough money, 
for instance, to make sure that not a single child goes hungry anywhere 
in the world ever again. It is enough money to end homelessness in 
America, provide free preschool and college for every American, build 
high-speed rail between every American city, and make childcare free 
for families.
  Frankly, come up with five problems that plague parts of the world or 
parts of the country, design a solution, and you could probably solve 
all five for a year for $847 billion.
  Here is another number that is big: $80 billion. Now, that is smaller 
than $847 billion but still a lot of money.
  For $80 billion, you could build a high-speed railroad from New York 
to Washington, you could build 4,000 brandnew, state-of-the-art high 
schools in underserved communities, or you could hire--wait for it--a 
million public school teachers.
  Here is why I tell you this. Next week, likely, this body is 
apparently going to be on a glidepath to pass an $847 billion Defense 
budget authorization for the current fiscal year. That is an $80 
billion increase over last year. That is a 10-percent increase in just 
1 year.
  There has been very little public debate, and there is going to be 
very little debate on this floor over whether this is a good idea, 
about whether we should spend $80 billion on this or whether that $80 
billion would be spent better on something else.
  There is no debate, and there is going to be little debate here, in 
part, because the process of passing this bill is pretty broken.
  Thanks to Senator Reed, the Armed Services Committee is a functioning 
committee. The Democrats and Republicans on that committee write this 
bill together with an open amendment process. If you are a member of 
the Armed Services Committee, thanks to Senator Reed and Senator 
Inhofe's leadership, you have a lot of opportunities to weigh in on the 
size and scope of the U.S. defense budget.
  But the problem begins once the bill leaves the Armed Services 
Committee. Then the bill kind of disappears and gets changed. That is 
not Chairman Reed's fault. That is our collective decision to endorse 
that process.
  The first thing that happens, particularly this year, is that many, 
many big, important pieces of policy get added to the Defense bill. 
Some of them are good policy, but some of them aren't. But there is no 
democratic process in which Members of this body get to review what is 
added to the Defense bill. There is no notification of rank-and-file 
Members so that we can provide input.

  Again, as I understand it, the Armed Services Committee doesn't want 
to be in this position. They would rather just have a vote on their 
original bill, as we did for decades until just recently, when all of 
this extra policy got added to the Defense bill. But because today 
there are so few avenues for that other legislation to find a path to 
the floor, in large part because Republicans are using the filibuster 
to clog up the floor of the Senate, the Defense bill becomes this kind 
of evacuation helicopter carrying all the passengers they can fit in 
it.
  For the first time this year, there are more pages in the Defense 
bill dedicated to nondefense items than to defense items.
  This might be acceptable if Senators could offer amendments on the 
floor, remove parts of the bill we don't like, make other parts 
better--at least have our day. But the other new normal here is that 
there is going to be zero amendments, amendment votes, likely in the 
Senate debate.
  It is the same problem. There are a handful of Republicans here who 
don't want to legislate, and so they are likely going to refuse to give 
consent to vote on amendments, and, plus, as I mentioned, they clog up 
the floor with filibuster votes, which means that you can't get big, 
important pieces of legislation done, and so they all find their way 
onto the Defense bill.
  But I just want to plead with my colleagues for a moment that there 
is a better way to do this. We don't have to look too far in the past 
to see what a real debate on the Defense bill could look like. I just 
want all of my colleagues to think how much more interesting this place 
would be, how much healthier the Senate would be if we

[[Page S7062]]

could have debates on Defense bills that looked like they did just 20 
years ago.
  I was just curious. So I literally just picked a year out of a hat 
from a slightly different generation in the Senate. I swear, I didn't 
cherry-pick the year. I just went back to 2000--the year 2000, right--a 
nice convenient date.
  For the fiscal year 2000 Defense bill debate--which by the way, 
happened in May, not in December--the Senate took rollcall votes on 13 
amendments. There were many amendments on contested, controversial 
policy that got full debate and full votes, and there were a whole 
bunch of other amendments that got voice votes in the Senate. But on 
the amendments that got full debate on the Senate floor and rollcall 
votes, there was an 87-12 vote on the legality of a new NATO strategic 
plan, a 49-50 vote to compel information from the Secretary of Health 
and Human Services on welfare reform, 48-52 on a War Powers Resolution 
for the war in the Balkans, 90-0 on a measure to encourage Balkan war 
crimes prosecution, 52-47 on a contested military promotion case, 40-60 
to authorize a new round of base closures, 44-56 on a nuclear weapon 
retirement policy, 49-51 and then 51-49 to remove restrictions on 
prison labor products, 49-51 to remove restrictions on abortions on DOD 
property, 21-77 to limit funding for the Balkan war, 11-87 to limit the 
cost of the F-18 program, and 98-0 to support sanctions on Libya.
  That is a lot of debate on really important foreign policy and 
national security policy on the floor of the Senate. That is virtually 
unthinkable in the modern Senate, and we are all poorer for it.
  Back then, every Senator--not just leadership--saw themselves as 
having a coequal responsibility to set U.S. defense policy, and they 
required the process on the floor to reflect that belief.
  In just that 1 year, 2000, Senators took three votes on the Balkan 
war, a vote on fighter costs, a vote on base closures, sanctions, and 
military promotions.
  I go through this exercise just to explain to my colleagues that it 
just doesn't have to be like this. Those of us not on the Armed 
Services Committee or not in leadership don't have to be relegated to 
70 rubberstamps with virtually no ability to have meaningful, realtime 
impact on the bill once it emerges from committee.
  But I make this point for another reason as well. When there is 
limited debate and limited input from rank-and-file Members on a bill 
this big, on policy this important, I would argue that we miss the 
opportunity to be able to step back from this year-to-year creep of 
existing policy and ask ourselves: Are we doing it right?
  Are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars in a way that 
actually protects this country and our national interests; or are we 
simply continuing down a path, continuing to invest and overinvest in 
weapons of war and underinvest in the tools that are necessary to 
prevent war?
  And $847 billion is a ton of money, but so is $80 billion, this 
year's increase in authorized defense spending.
  Now, let me say this: There is no doubt that there are legions of 
meritorious programs in this defense budget. Frankly, I publicly and 
proudly support many programs that are built and constructed in 
Connecticut: our submarine fleet, our helicopters, our fighter engines.
  Why? Because I really do believe that the United States is the 
world's defender of democracy, the defender of the rule of law, the 
defender of international norms and free navigation. We have to be the 
world leader in kinetic, hard military power.
  Ukraine is an example of why conventional military might still 
matters. Big nations, like Russia and China, are not content any longer 
to stay inside their boxes. They are, like pre-World War II times, 
seeking to revise their borders through invasion; and while the United 
States is currently at no risk of being invaded ourselves, we do still 
have a responsibility to step up and help others, to help reinforce 
that post-World War II order to ensure that wars of aggression do not 
become normalized.
  But that post-World War II order is under threat not just because 
countries like Russia and China are using or threatening to use their 
militaries with alarming new frequency. The lion's share of threats to 
the United States and threats to world stability are often referred to 
not as conventional military threats but what is commonly referred to 
as asymmetric threats.
  Now, this generally means they are threats that cannot be addressed 
just through military power--air power, armies, nuclear weapons, the 
kind of things that are funded in this Defense bill.
  Let me give you some examples. Thousands of pages of think tank 
reports and endless hours of congressional testimony are dedicated to 
this lament that China's influence around the world is growing due to 
its willingness to aggressively invest in developing economies, 
critical mineral supplies, and supply chain routes. For instance, today 
China owns over 100 different international ports. They own a hundred 
ports outside of China in 60 different countries.
  A new study revealed that China's development bank lent more money in 
sub-Saharan Africa than the development banks of the United States, 
Germany, Japan, and France combined. Now, to fix this, we need to be 
growing the size of U.S. development finance. But it is like pulling 
teeth to get Congress to extend the authorities or borrowing and 
capital limitations of the U.S. International Development Finance 
Corporation.
  Last year, DFC announced that it had lent more money than any year 
before: $7.4 billion. That is a lot of money, $7.4 billion. This July, 
China's largest development bank announced that its 6-month total for a 
targeted set of urban infrastructure loans in the developing world, 
just a tiny piece of their overall portfolio, was $27 billion.
  U.S. development finance isn't even playing in the same ballpark as 
Chinese development finance.
  Here is another example of asymmetric power: It is kind of cliche 
these days to remind policymakers that information is power. But 
Ukraine's democracy is not just under attack from a foreign army; it is 
also under attack from misinformation. China, Russia, Iran, nonstate 
actors, they are spending billions of dollars all over the world 
spreading messages into democracies to try to create division and 
undermine faith in the rule of law.
  That controversy around Colin Kaepernick's protest, that was mostly a 
creation of 500 Russian internet bots who posted an incredible 12,000 
tweets inflaming public opinion.
  China's global disinformation campaign is equally robust. For 
instance, the largest backer of Philippines' President--former 
President Rodrigo Duterte's illegal assassination campaign? Chinese 
social media farms.
  But, once again, the United States just chooses asymmetry by letting 
these countries--Russia and China and others--dominate the information 
space.
  Here is an example: the budget for RT, just one of Putin's 
international television and online news operations, $2.8 billion; the 
budget for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds all of our 
overseas broadcasting, $1 billion.
  How do you compete with those kind of funding discrepancies?
  Here is one more example. A few years ago, I was in Dublin, 
coincidentally, at the same time of a major telecommunications contract 
tender in Ireland. Ireland was making this key decision to award its 
internet backbone to a European firm or to Huawei, the Chinese 
communications conglomerate.
  I was told by a very competent but, frankly, very overwhelmed defense 
attache assigned to our Irish Embassy that, over the prior few months, 
the Chinese Embassy had grown by leaps and bounds as dozens of new 
Chinese diplomats and provocateurs arrived in town to try to help sway 
the award for Huawei. Now, matched up against this legion of Chinese 
diplomats was this one guy, our single defense attache, maybe supported 
by a couple diplomats in the Embassy.
  Now, he was competent, but he had no background in telecommunications 
policy--and, frankly, really nobody else there did either, and no extra 
help was on the way.
  The same phenomenon plays out with energy projects. Other nations

[[Page S7063]]

seamlessly integrate their energy resources with their diplomatic and 
national security efforts. There is no separation between the 
Middle East's oil and their foreign politics. The same for Russia or 
Iran or Venezuela. But U.S. energy executives are not representing the 
U.S. Government, which means our diplomats are on their own in 
conducting energy policy, which means they have an enormous amount of 
catching up to do against these other petro powers.

  But for the first time, today, the United States is not the leading 
country when it comes to diplomatic posts around the world. That 
distinction now belongs to--guess who?--China. As our adversaries try 
to undermine democracies and rule of law and use their energy and 
technology resources to win allies, we simply don't have the means to 
keep up, another asymmetric advantage for our competitors.
  We have no dedicated anticorruption or technology or energy policy 
corps within our foreign service. It is not because we don't need this 
capacity; it is just because we can't afford it. We lament this 
asymmetric advantage that other countries have on nondefense 
capabilities, but it is just a choice. It is a choice because we pass, 
year after year, these massive defense bills, and then we choose not to 
increase the capabilities that would actually protect us: the 
investments in nonmilitary capabilities.
  Listen, I get it. I know this bill is going to pass, but why on Earth 
aren't we spending more time asking the tough questions about whether 
the balance of our spending on national security is right-sized to the 
actual threats the United States and our democratic allies face?
  Yes, the Ukraine war is worth fighting, and it is expensive, but does 
it really make sense to spend 847 times more money on conventional 
military tools than we spend on winning the information war? Does it 
really make sense to add 10 percent to the defense budget while doing 
nothing to increase the size of our international development bank?
  Do we really think that we are adequately responding to the actual 
array of threats posed to this country with a spending allocation that 
ends up with America having 11,000 diplomats, total, and 12,000 
employees of military grocery stores?
  American foreign policy today suffers from a crippling lack of 
imagination. American leaders complain about these asymmetric threats 
but refuse to acknowledge that this asymmetry exists only because we 
choose to do this: pass an $847 billion defense budget with a 10 
percent, 1-year increase and do nothing, at the same time, to build the 
real capacities necessary to keep up with our adversaries' investments 
in nonmilitary tools of influence.
  We could decide--this Congress could decide--to build a massive, 
modern international development bank. We could decide--this Congress 
could decide--not to let RT dominate the international information 
space. We could decide--all of us, this Congress--to have enough 
diplomats around the world to be able to fight the fights that matter 
to us.
  We should imagine this world in which we fight toe to toe with the 
Chinese and the Russians and other adversaries in the development, 
information, technology, energy, and diplomatic spheres. We should 
imagine that world and then put in place a plan to achieve it.
  Asymmetry is a choice. It is a choice for our adversaries, and it is 
a choice for us. And it is a consequence of our entire budget--for 
development aid, anti-propaganda efforts, democracy promotion, human 
rights advancement, humanitarian assistance, and diplomacy--being about 
the same size as the 1-year increase in the defense budget.
  And $847 billion is a lot of money to spend without a real debate on 
the Senate floor, without the ability to offer amendments. I think this 
country would be better off, I think our security would be better 
protected, if we just took a step back, asked some hard questions about 
how we allocate money within our national security budget, and took the 
time to have a real floor debate with real input about it all.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Warnock). The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.