[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6566]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             DON'T STOP WITH IMPROVING DEFENSE PROCUREMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, this body took an important step today by 
passing the IMPROVE Acquisitions Act, which will bring badly needed 
reforms to the defense procurement process. The Pentagon, of course, is 
legendary for bureaucratic inefficiency, cost overruns, and even 
outright corruption in its purchasing practices. Remember the $640 
toilet seat that the Navy bought back in the 1980s? Remember our 
soldiers in Iraq sifting through scrap heaps for makeshift body armor?

                              {time}  1600

  For too long, Mr. Speaker, the Pentagon has been the irresponsible 
teenager who gets a ridiculously generous allowance, loses part of it, 
and then spends the rest on junk food. With this new bill, though, mom 
and dad will begin to exercise some oversight over that allowance. 
Given the size of the DOD budget and the nature of its mission, it is 
about time. It's remarkable that up until now, there's been no 
effective performance metric system to assure that taxpayers are 
getting value for their defense dollars.
  We're living through a time, Mr. Speaker, when nearly every American 
family is tightening its belt and making sure that every dollar it 
spends is on something it truly needs. We owe it to these families to 
ensure that the government agency charged with keeping them safe is 
doing the same.
  As pleased as I am with the passage of the IMPROVE Act, I can't help 
but think that we are nibbling around the edges of a much, much larger 
problem. The issue is not just a managerial one of how the Pentagon 
goes about its acquisitions. The more significant matter is the 
Nation's overall defense policy and budget priorities. For example, we 
continue to spend billions of dollars every year on sacred cow weapons 
systems that were designed for a bygone era.
  Finally, last year, we cut off funding for the F-22 Raptor, designed 
to neutralize the next generation of Soviet planes. I guess it took 
almost 20 years to figure out there has been no generation of Soviet 
plane because there's been no generation of the Soviet Union. But we're 
still throwing money at the V-22 Osprey, a plane so wasteful and 
unnecessary that even former Vice President Cheney was trying to kill 
it as far back as the late 1980s when he was Secretary of Defense. 
According to our analysis at the Congressional Progressive Caucus, we 
can save $60 billion, at least, a year by eliminating such Cold War 
relics.
  And, Mr. Speaker, then there's the biggest ticket item of all, 
purportedly keeping us safe but actually spending us into bankruptcy 
and undermining our national security interests. I'm referring to the 
ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Every day, at a predicted price 
tag of around $1 trillion, we are sending American soldiers to die for 
a strategy that is a moral outrage and a practical failure. For a 
fraction of the cost, we could take a smarter approach by expanding 
poor countries' capacity to provide for their own people. That means 
more resources for democracy promotion, physical infrastructure, human 
capital development, et cetera, et cetera. That would be the way to 
fight terrorism--with compassion, not aggression; using diplomacy, not 
destruction; by investing, rather than invading.
  So let's do more than streamline procurement, because, Mr. Speaker, 
if we overhaul the way we go about protecting America and we redefine 
what it means to provide for the common defense as the Constitution 
instructs us to do, we will do the right thing, and the right thing 
will be to start by bringing our troops home.

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