[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 17032]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        WASTE OF TAXPAYER MONEY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
North Carolina (Mr. Jones) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I continue to be amazed and disappointed that 
the Republican Party wants to keep putting money in a black hole. The 
black hole is known as Afghanistan.
  The story broke yesterday that the Pentagon spent $43 million on a 
single natural gas station in Afghanistan when it should have cost no 
more than $300,000. The Pentagon spent over $30 million in overhead 
costs to build this one gas station, and the gas station was set up to 
service a kind of car that a huge majority of Afghans cannot afford. 
The Pentagon also will not answer any questions about this ridiculous 
waste of money.
  The $43 million gas station is one of the hundreds of examples of the 
waste of the taxpayers' money in Afghanistan. John Sopko has repeatedly 
written about the waste in Afghanistan. I don't know why Congress has 
continued to fund the waste and fraud in Afghanistan.
  Instead, last week, Congress passed a budget deal that increased 
defense spending over the next 2 years by over $80 billion a year. I 
did not vote for this bill. We already have a national debt of over $18 
trillion, and I cannot, in good conscience, vote to add $1.5 trillion 
to the debt.
  The budget deal also puts $59 million into the Overseas Contingency 
Operation fund, which is a slush fund for spending money in 
unauthorized wars in the Middle East. I am for rebuilding our military, 
but I am not in favor of the waste in Afghanistan.
  Mr. Speaker, enough is enough. President Obama signed us up for 9 
more years in Afghanistan when he signed the bilateral security 
agreement last year. On Friday, he announced that he is putting 
American troops on the ground in Syria in an open-ended mission. This 
is a waste of money and a waste of lives. It needs to stop, and 
Congress has the power to stop it; but we will not use our 
constitutional authority to even debate what he is doing in the Middle 
East.
  Mr. Speaker, I bring with me posters from time to time. I look at the 
deaths of so many men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who serve our 
Nation, and it breaks my heart.
  So to make my point before I close, Mr. Speaker, we still have 
Americans dying in Afghanistan, but it doesn't make the papers anymore. 
We had a soldier from Fort Bragg--which is not in my district, but it 
is in North Carolina--who was killed in Iraq last week.
  Mr. Speaker, I bring this poster today because it tells the story 
much better than my words could ever tell the story about war. It is a 
lady holding her little girl's hand. The little girl has her finger in 
her mouth, and she is wondering why her daddy is in a flag-draped 
coffin. I don't know what to tell that little girl. All I can tell that 
little girl is that Congress is indifferent to sending our young men 
and women to die in the Middle East.
  It is time for Congress to meet its constitutional responsibility and 
have a debate and a vote on the floor of the House.
  

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