[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 184 (Wednesday, December 11, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6963-S6965]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
National Priorities
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, as the holiday season approaches, it is
an appropriate time to talk about our national priorities, where we are
as a nation, and where we should be going into the future.
Right now, tonight, as we assemble here in Washington, DC, there are
thousands of people in this city and in the surrounding areas who are
sleeping out on the streets. And that is not just Washington, DC, it is
almost every major city in the country.
When we talk about the housing crisis, it is not just homelessness,
it is a reality that millions of people in Vermont and throughout this
country are paying 40, 50, 60 percent of their limited incomes for
housing. We have a major housing crisis. We need to invest in low-
income and affordable housing.
Today, in the United States, in the richest country in the history of
the world, which today has more income and wealth inequality than it
has ever had, while the very rich become much richer, 60 percent of our
people are living paycheck to paycheck and millions of workers are
earning starvation wages, barely enough to stay alive.
The time is long overdue, when we talk about our national priorities,
that this Congress pass a livable minimum wage. Raise that minimum wage
to a livable level so that no worker in this country who works 40 hours
a week lives in poverty--not a radical idea.
In the United States today, we have a broken and dysfunctional
healthcare system whose major function is not to provide quality,
affordable care to our people but to make billions in profits for the
insurance companies and the drug companies.
The truth is that while 85 million Americans are uninsured or
underinsured, while 60,000 die each year because they don't get to a
doctor in time, the insurance companies and the drug companies make
tens of billions of dollars a year in profit.
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The time is long overdue for the United States to do what every other
major country on Earth does, and that is to guarantee healthcare to all
people as a human right. In my view, the most efficient way to do that
is to pass a Medicare for all single payer program.
Unbelievably, in this wealthy Nation in which three people on top own
more wealth than the bottom half of our society, we have the highest
rate of childhood poverty of almost any developed country on Earth, and
on top of that, millions of parents, working-class parents, cannot find
affordable or quality childcare. We need to make quality childcare
available for all.
In America today, unbelievably, in my view, 25 percent of senior
citizens in our country are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or
less--$15,000 a year. I don't know how anybody in America, no matter
where you live--let alone if you are a senior citizen with additional
healthcare and other needs--I don't know how anybody survives on
$15,000. We need to expand Social Security benefits by lifting the cap
on taxable income so that every senior in this country can retire with
dignity and security.
Those are just a few of the things that, in my view, we should be
doing in Congress if we are representing the needs of all Americans and
not just wealthy campaign contributors in the top 1 percent.
But tonight I want to say a few words about something that we should
not be doing, and that is, in the coming days, with almost no debate,
we should not be passing the National Defense Authorization Act, which
provides some $900 billion for the Department of Defense--a little bit
less than that--$895.2 billion. When spending on nuclear weapons and
emergency defense funding is included, the United States will spend
this year close to $1 trillion on the military--$1 trillion on the
military, and a few blocks away from here, people are sleeping out on
the streets.
While middle-class and working-class families are struggling to
survive, we supposedly just don't have the financial resources to help
them. We just cannot afford to build more housing. We just cannot
afford to provide quality childcare to our kids or to support public
education or to provide healthcare to all. We just can't afford to do
that. But when the military-industrial complex and all of their well-
paid lobbyists come marching into Capitol Hill, somehow or other, there
is more than enough money for Congress to provide them with virtually
everything they need. The military-industrial complex speaks, and
Congress responds.
Of that nearly $1 trillion that will be voted on in the next few
days, about half will go to a handful of hugely profitable defense
contractors. The Pentagon accounts for about two-thirds of all Federal
contracting, obligating more money every year than all civilian Federal
Agencies combined--combined. Yet the Pentagon remains the only major
Federal Agency that cannot pass an independent audit.
The Department of Defense still cannot accurately account for their
finances more than 30 years after Congress made it a requirement under
Federal law. In the most recent failed audit attempt, the Department of
Defense still could not fully account for huge portions of its more
than $4 trillion in assets. The GAO--the Government Accountability
Office--reports that the Defense Department cannot accurately post
transactions to the correct accounts each year. Auditors find billions
of dollars the Pentagon didn't even know it had. In fiscal year 2022,
Navy auditors found $4.4 billion in untracked inventory. They just lost
it. Hey, what is $4 billion among friends when you have $1 trillion to
play with?
I don't often agree with Elon Musk. I agree with him very, very
rarely. But he is right when he says the Pentagon ``has little idea how
its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent.'' That is Musk.
The inability to track taxpayer dollars has allowed, within the
Defense Department, massive fraud, massive amounts of waste, and
unbelievable amounts of cost overruns. Defense contractors routinely
overcharge the Pentagon by 40 percent and sometimes much higher than
that.
For example, just one example, in October, a few months ago, RTX--
formerly Raytheon--was fined $950 million for inflating bills to the
Department of Defense as they lied about labor and material costs and
as they paid bribes to secure foreign business. They were fined $950
million.
In June, Lockheed Martin was fined $70 million for overcharging the
Navy for aircraft parts--the latest in a long line of similar abuses.
The F-35--the most expensive weapon system in history--has run up
hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns. GAO now estimates
that it will cost more than $2 trillion to develop, maintain, and
operate this fighter jet through its lifetime.
Today, as a result of massive consolidation in the defense industry,
a large portion of the Pentagon budget now goes to just a handful of
huge defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, RTX--formerly Raytheon--
General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. That consolidation has been
extremely profitable for the industry.
Since 2022, these four contractors have brought in over 600 billion
in revenues, including 353 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds and recorded
57 billion in profits. During that same period, they have spent 61
billion on dividends and stock buybacks to make their wealthy
shareholders even wealthier. That is just four companies, over less
than 3 years, taking 353 billion in taxpayer money and handing 61
billion back to wealthy shareholders.
It is worthwhile listening to what Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro
said earlier this year to a defense industry convention. This is the
Secretary of the Navy speaking to defense contractors:
Many of you are making record profits, as evidenced by your
quarterly financial statements. . . . You can't be asking for
the American taxpayer to make greater public investments
while you continue to goose your stock prices through stock
buybacks . . . and other accounting maneuvers.
That is the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and he is quite right.
It is not only fraud and cost overruns that drive up military
spending. The major defense contractors also provide their CEOs with
exorbitant compensation packages. In the last 3 years for which
information is available, the top four defense companies paid their
CEOs more than 257 million combined. These companies are all
significantly reliant on the U.S. taxpayer. Yet they pay their CEOs
about 100 times more than the Secretary of Defense receives. CEOs,
defense industry, receive more than 100 times greater compensation than
the U.S. Secretary of Defense and 500 times more than the average newly
enlisted servicemember.
Now, how does that happen? How does it happen that the Defense
Department can't pass an audit? How does it happen that every one of
the major defense contractors ends up paying fines for fraud? How does
it happen that we have massive cost overruns, and yet we give the
military industrial complex pretty much what they want. And, by the
way, there will be virtually no debate on that issue here on the floor.
It is only a trillion dollars. Hey, what is a trillion dollars among
friends?
People sleeping out on the street; people can't afford healthcare;
children going hungry; elderly people can't afford to heat their homes.
Got a trillion bucks, no questions asked, for the military industrial
complex.
So how does all of this happen? And I think most Americans now know
the answer. It ain't complicated. These companies--just like the drug
companies, just like the insurance companies, just like Wall Street and
the big banks, just like the fossil fuel industry--they spend millions
and millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying. In the
recent election cycle, the one we just came through, defense
contractors spent nearly $251 million on lobbying and contributed
almost 37 million to political candidates.
And surprise, surprise, aren't we all shocked that they end up
getting what they want with almost no debate?
The waste and fraud in the defense industry is not just,
interestingly enough, costing American taxpayers huge amounts of money,
it is also costing lives. So let me tell you what I mean by that. Take
a look at the war in Ukraine. The United States is providing tens and
tens of billions of dollars to help defend Ukraine from Putin's
horrific invasion of that country.
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Despite their recordbreaking profits, many defense contractors said
that they couldn't ramp up production of key weapons without more
taxpayer support. So the U.S. Government wanted to support, with my
vote, Ukraine against Putin's invasion. Ukraine needs weapons. And the
defense contractors said: Hey, if you want us to help Ukraine, get them
weapons, we need to ramp up production. We need more Federal aid.
And so, as part of that process, Congress repeatedly appropriated
emergency funding with roughly 78.5 billion going to buy equipment and
services from the major defense contractors for Ukraine.
And how did, with all of that money, these patriotic defense
contractors respond? Did they say: ``Well, thank you. We are going to
do everything we can, get all of the weapons we can at a reasonable
price to Ukraine, which is fighting for its life''? Not quite.
What the defense contractors did is jack up the prices they were
charging us in order to help Ukraine. RTX increased prices for Stinger
missiles from $25,000 in the 1990s to $400,000 in 2023. Even accounting
for inflation and improvements in technology, that is an outrageous
price increase.
But it wasn't enough for RTX. A recent NATO contract reveals RTX is
now charging approximately $745,000 per Stinger. Lockheed Martin and
RTX raised the price of the Javelin missile system from about 263,000
per unit just before the war to 350,000 this year.
The United States has provided more than 10,000 Javelins to Ukraine.
Similar price hikes took place for Patriot missiles and other weapons
systems.
And make no mistake, every time a contractor pads its profit margins,
fewer weapons reach the frontlines. The greed of these defense
contractors is not just costing American taxpayers huge amounts of
money, it is killing Ukrainians. They are getting less weapons than
they should, given the amount of money that we are spending.
And there is a name for all of this. It is called war profiteering,
and this is not a new problem. During World War II, then-U.S. Senator
from Missouri Harry Truman was shocked by the profits made by military
contractors while American boys were getting killed in Europe and in
the east. And he appointed a special commission--it is called the
Truman Commission--to investigate war profiteering, and they found
massive amounts of fraud.
In my view, that is exactly what we should be doing now. We should be
instituting a Truman Commission, or call it whatever you want, to take
a hard look at the prices that the defense industry is charging us for
the weapons they provide.
We should also consider other ideas to reduce waste and fraud in the
military industrial complex, such as wider use of the Defense
Production Act, significant penalties for audit failures, and a
windfall profit tax on hugely profitable defense companies.
Most Americans would agree that we need a strong military, and I
agree that we need a strong military. But we do not need a defense
system that is designed to make huge profits for a handful of giant
defense contractors while providing less of what the military needs. We
do not need to spend almost a trillion dollars on the military while
half a million Americans are homeless, while children go hungry, and
while elderly people have difficulty heating their homes.
Let me conclude by saying something, which I think is one of the more
profound statements ever made by a President, and that is that Dwight
D. Eisenhower, who was a former five-star general and a Republican
President from 1952 to 1960--he warned us about everything that I am
talking about in his farewell address in 1961, and it would be very
wise for us to remember what President Eisenhower said, and this is the
quote. I quote President Eisenhower:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will
persist.
What Eisenhower said was true in 1961. It is even more true today.
I intend to vote against this inflated military budget.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.