[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 12747]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       AIR FORCE TANKER DECISION

  (Mr. SMITH of Washington asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, the GAO is scheduled this week 
to decide whether or not to overturn the Air Force decision on awarding 
the tanker contract to Airbus. We have already heard this morning that 
the Air Force has discovered that they made numerous mistakes in how 
they calculated the cost.
  There is another huge issue. We hope the GAO does the right thing and 
overturns that decision, but even if they don't, we have to keep in 
mind that our country has a trade action against Airbus right now for 
unfairly and illegally subsidizing their products, the very product 
that the Air Force has decided to buy.
  If we want to enforce our trade laws against our trading partners to 
our advantage, it makes no sense whatsoever to reward precisely the 
illegal, unfair behavior that we are trying to stop them from doing. 
Giving them this contract does that, and we should overturn it either 
by the GAO or by Congress if they don't and not reward unfair 
subsidization by our foreign competitors.

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