[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 17]
[House]
[Page 23023]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO BE ACCOUNTABLE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Forbes) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FORBES. Madam Speaker, when you travel around the country today, 
one of the things that we see is that a lot of people are divided over 
different issues. But one thing that they all seem to be in unison 
about is the need for our government to be accountable, the 
administration to be accountable to the House and to the Senate and for 
us to be accountable to the people that we represent.
  Oftentimes, we spend hours on this floor debating just how we're 
going to bring about that accountability, and that's why it's so 
disappointing at the end of the day to realize it doesn't really matter 
what we put in the statutes because the administration is determined 
that they're just not going to comply with it.
  This year, Madam Speaker, when we're looking at one of the largest 
budgets we have, the defense budget, the Secretary of Defense issued a 
gag order prohibiting hundreds of members of the Pentagon from doing 
what they do every year, and that is to just communicate with Members 
of Congress, to tell them where cuts were being made and where moneys 
were going to various programs. It's one thing if they want to stop 
them from talking to Members of Congress, but then when they failed to 
comply with the statutes that dictate that they send us information so 
that we can make those independent assessments, Madam Speaker, that's 
where it becomes even more frustrating.
  The statute that's passed by this Congress, signed by the President, 
says that the Secretary of Defense, when he sends his budget over, has 
to give the Armed Services Committee a shipbuilding plan. It makes 
common sense. It makes good sense that we know how many ships we were 
going to build, how many ships we were going to have so we could 
compare them with other nations. And then he has to certify that the 
budget he sends over meets that plan.
  He has to do the same thing with an aviation plan, required by law 
that he submits to us an aviation plan telling us which planes we are 
going to build, how many planes we're going to have, and a 
certification that the budget complies with that aviation plan.

                              {time}  1545

  This year he just refused to do it. When we asked him about it, he 
responded with no information at all. So the Armed Services Committee, 
on a bipartisan basis with every member of the Armed Services Committee 
agreeing, every Democrat, every Republican, passed a congressional 
inquiry mandating that the Secretary of Defense comply with the law and 
send us the shipbuilding plan and the aviation plan by September 15 so 
we would have those figures before the conference committee came back 
on the Defense authorization bill. And, Madam Speaker, to date he has 
refused to submit those plans to the Armed Services Committee.
  So, Madam Speaker, the difficulty we have is this: How do you as the 
Secretary of Defense look at our men and women in uniform across the 
world who are defending this country and say to them, You need to 
comply with the law, you need to comply with the regulations that we 
send out of the Pentagon, but it does not apply to him and he continues 
to skirt the law?
  Madam Speaker, the American people deserve better, and we're going to 
continue to fight until we get that information to hold the 
accountability that we think they need.

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