S. 4049

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, in this unprecedented moment in American history, I think there is a crying out all across this country for us to rethink who we are as a nation and what our national priorities are.

Whether it is fighting against systemic racism and police brutality, whether it is the need to combat climate change and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, whether it is the absurdity of being the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right, or whether it is the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality, where three people today own more wealth than the bottom half of our Nation, all across this country people are crying out for change--real change.

When we talk about the need for real change, it is beyond comprehension the degree to which Congress continues to ignore our bloated $740 billion defense budget. We talk about everything. Democrats and Republicans disagree on almost everything, but when it comes to this huge budget, which has gone up by over $100 billion since Trump has been President, there is, unfortunately, a broad consensus, and that is wrong.

Year after year, Democrats and Republicans come together with minimal debate to support an exploding Pentagon budget, which is now higher than that of the next 11 nations combined and represents some 53 percent of our discretionary spending. We are spending more on the military than the next 11 nations combined. That is Russia, China, UK, France, and you name it. That is more than all of them combined, and we are spending on the military budget over half of our discretionary spending.

Incredibly--and I know we don't talk about this too much--after adjusting for inflation, we are now spending more on the military than we did during the height of the Cold War, when we were in opposition to the Soviet Union, a major superpower, or during the wars in Vietnam and Korea. After adjusting for inflation, we are spending more today than we did during the time of the Vietnam war.

This extraordinary level of military spending comes at a time when the Department of Defense is the only agency of our Federal Government that has not been able to pass an independent audit. It comes at a time when defense contractors are making enormous profits while paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages and when the so-called War on Terror will end up costing us some $6 trillion. This is an agency that has not passed an independent audit.

I believe this is a moment in history when it would be a very good idea for the American people and my colleagues here in the Senate to remember the very profound statement made by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower back in 1953. I think all of us remember that Eisenhower was a four-star general who led the Allied forces to victory in Europe. He knew a little bit about the military.

Eisenhower said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

What Eisenhower said 67 years ago was true then. It is true now. If the horrific pandemic we are now experiencing has taught us anything, it is that ``national security'' means a lot more than building bombs, missiles, jet fighters, tanks, submarines, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass destruction.

``National security'' also means doing everything that we can to make sure that every man, woman, and child in this country lives with dignity and security, and that includes many people and many communities around this country that have been abandoned by our government decade after decade.

Without a moment's hesitation, we spend billions and billions on the military, while we come to work and step over people who are sleeping out on the streets and move away from communities where children are getting totally inadequate educations and where teachers are underpaid.

I believe that the time is long overdue to begin the transformation of our national priorities, and I cannot think of a better way to do that than by cutting military spending.

I have, for this bill, filed three separate amendments, and I would like to discuss them briefly.

The first amendment would reduce the military budget by 10 percent and use the $74 billion in savings to invest in distressed communities around the country that have been ravaged by extreme poverty, mass incarceration, deindustrialization, and decades of neglect. We are proposing to transfer money from the military into distressed communities all over this country where people are suffering, where people are hurting, where people are unemployed, where people don't have any healthcare, where infrastructure is crumbling, where people need help.

This amendment is being cosponsored by the Senators from Massachusetts--Senator Markey and Senator Warren. Importantly--and I hope my colleagues hear this--this amendment has the support of more than 60 organizations throughout this country, representing millions of workers, environmentalists, and religious leaders, including Public Citizen, Union of Concerned Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Greenpeace, and the United Methodist Church.

At a time when more Americans have died from the coronavirus than were killed in World War I, when over 30 million people have lost their jobs in recent months, when tens of millions of Americans are in danger of being evicted from their homes, when education in America, from childcare to graduate school, is in desperate need of reform, when over half a million Americans are homeless, when close to 100 million people are either uninsured or underinsured, now is the time to invest in our people, in jobs, in education, in housing, and in healthcare--not in more nuclear weapons, not in more tanks, not in more guns.

Under this amendment, distressed cities and towns in every State in this country would be able to use these funds to create jobs by building affordable housing, building new schools, childcare facilities, community health centers, public hospitals, libraries, sustainable energy projects, and clean drinking water facilities.

These communities would also receive Federal funding to hire more public schoolteachers, provide nutritious meals to children and parents, and offer free tuition at public colleges, universities, or trade schools.

This is a pivotal moment in American history, and it is time to respond to those crises that we are facing by transforming our national priorities.

Do we really want to spend more--billions more--on endless wars in the Middle East, or do we want to provide decent jobs to millions of Americans who are now unemployed? Do we want to spend more money on nuclear weapons, or do we want to invest in a childcare system that is dysfunctional, in an education system where community after community lacks the funds to provide decent, quality education for their kids? Do we want to invest in affordable housing when half a million Americans are homeless and 18 million families in America are spending half of their incomes on housing?

Those are the choices that we face, and I think the American people are clear that the time is now to invest in our people, not in more weapons systems.

When we analyze the Defense Department budget, it is very interesting to note that Congress has appropriated so much money for the Defense Department that the Pentagon literally does not know what to do with it. According to the GAO, between 2013 and 2018, the Pentagon returned more than $80 billion in funding back to the Treasury

People sleep out on the streets, children go hungry, schools are crumbling, people have no health insurance, but we have given the Department of Defense so much money that they are actually returning some of it back to the government.

In my view, the time is long overdue for us to take a hard look not only at the size of the Pentagon budget but at the enormous amount of waste, cost overruns, fraud, and the financial mismanagement that has plagued the Department of Defense for decades.

Let us be clear. About half of the Pentagon's budget--and people, I think, don't know this--goes directly into the hands of private contractors, not the troops. Over the past two decades, virtually every major defense contractor in the United States has paid millions and millions of dollars in fines and settlements for misconduct and fraud, all while making huge profits on those government contracts. This is at a time when we are not very vigorous in terms of our oversight.

Despite that, since 1995, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies have paid over $3 billion in fines or related settlements for fraud or misconduct--$3 billion. That is what they have been caught doing. That is what they have been found guilty of or agreed to in a settlement. God knows what else is going on that we still don't know about.

Yet those same three companies received around $1 trillion in defense contracts over the past two decades alone.

Further, I find it interesting that the very same defense contractors that have been found guilty or reached settlements for fraud are also paying their CEOs excessive compensation packages.

Last year, the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman both made around $20 million in total compensation, while around 90 percent of the companies' revenue came from defense contracts. In other words, these companies--and I am talking about Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman--for all intents and purposes, are governmental agencies. Over 90 percent of their revenue comes from the taxpayers. Yet the CEOs of those companies made over 100 times more than the Secretary of Defense. It is not too surprising, therefore, that we have a revolving door where our military people end up on the boards of directors of these major defense companies.

Moreover, as the GAO has told us, there are massive cost overruns in the Defense Department's acquisition budget that we have to address. According to GAO, the Pentagon's $1.8 trillion acquisition portfolio currently suffers from more than $628 billion in cost overruns, with much of the cost growth taking place after production. In other words, they quote a price, and then they come back after they get the contract and say: Oh, we made a slight mistake; you are going to have pay twice as much or 50 percent more, whatever it might be, for the weapons system you wanted.

GAO tells us that ``many DoD programs fall short of cost, schedule, and performance expectations, meaning DoD pays more than anticipated, can buy less than expected, and, in some cases, delivers less capability to the warfighter.''

A major reason why there is so much waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon is the fact that the Department of Defense remains the only Federal agency that hasn't been able to pass an independent audit. That is why I have filed an amendment with Senators Grassley, Wyden, and Lee that would require the Defense Department to pass a clean audit no later than fiscal year 2025.

When you have an agency that spends some $700 billion, I don't think it is too much to ask that we have an independent audit of the Department of Defense

Interestingly enough, many of us will recall what then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--not one of my favorite public officials--told the American people on the day before 9/11 about the serious financial mismanagement at the DOD. Here is what Donald Rumsfeld said. Needless to say, the following day was 9/11. That was the terrorist attack against the United States, so what Rumsfeld said the day before that never got a whole lot of attention. But this is what a conservative Republican Secretary of Defense said:

Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building--

That is the Pentagon.

because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.

And yet, nearly 20 years after Donald Rumsfeld's statement, the Defense Department has still not passed a clean audit, despite the fact that the Pentagon controls assets in excess of $2.2 trillion or, roughly, 70 percent of what the entire Federal Government owns.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded in 2011 that $31 billion to $60 billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan had been lost to fraud and waste.

Separately, in 2015, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that the Pentagon could not account for $45 billion in funding for reconstruction projects. More recently, an audit conducted by Ernst & Young for the Defense Logistics Agency found that it could not properly account for some $800 million in construction projects.

It is time to hold the Defense Department to the same level of accountability as the rest of the government. That is not a radical idea. And support for this concept is bipartisan. That is why I am delighted that this amendment is supported by Senators Grassley and Lee, as well as Senator Wyden, and we hope it will be supported by a strong majority of the Members of the body.

I believe in a strong military, but we cannot continue to give more money to the Pentagon than it needs when millions of children in our country are food insecure--there are kids all over this country, in every State in this country, who are hungry--and when we have 140 million people who cannot afford the basic necessities of life without going into debt.

Further, let us be very clear, when we are talking about the need to protect the American people, we are talking about the need to defeat our most immediate adversary right now, an adversary that has taken in recent months over 120,000 American lives, and that, of course, is the coronavirus.

When we talk about defense, when we talk about protecting the American people, we must get our priorities right and do everything we can to protect the American people from the coronavirus. I don't think nuclear weapons are going to do it. I don't think tanks are going to do it. I don't think F-35s are going to do it. But we need to do everything we can to protect the lives and the health of the American people in terms of the coronavirus.

What virtually every scientist who has studied this issue will tell us--and they just told me that this morning as a member of the HELP Committee--is that the most effective way to prevent the transmission of this deadly virus and to stop unnecessary deaths from COVID-19 is for everybody in this country to wear a mask. It is not rocket science, not very complicated, but if you wear a mask when you are in contact with other people, the likelihood that you will spread the virus or get the virus is significantly reduced.

That is why I have filed an amendment which requires the Trump administration to use the Defense Production Act to manufacture the hundreds and hundreds of millions of high-quality masks that this country needs and to deliver them to every household in America.

This is not a radical idea. It is an idea that is being implemented all across the world, in countries like South Korea, France, Turkey, Austria, and many other countries; that is, they are distributing high- quality face masks to all of their people for free or at virtually no cost. That is what I believe we have to do.

There was a study that just came out from the University of Washington very recently, which suggested that if 95 percent of the American people wore face masks when they interact with others, we could save some 30,000 lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

I think this is a commonsense amendment. It is beyond my comprehension how in the wealthiest nation in the world, with the strongest economy, we have not been able to produce the personal protective equipment--the masks, gowns, gloves--that our doctors and nurses and medical personnel need. We have to do that, but we also have to produce the masks that the American people need.

As everyone knows, over the past 3 months, the coronavirus has infected more than 2.5 million Americans and caused nearly 130,000 deaths. More Americans have died from the coronavirus than were killed fighting in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined.

Sadly, there is new evidence that this pandemic is far from over and may kill many tens of thousands more. In the past few days, new COVID- 19 cases in the United States have increased dramatically--jumping to their highest level in 2 months and returning to where they were at the peak of the outbreak.

If we take bold action now, we could prevent tens of thousands of Americans from dying. That is exactly what we have to do. Unfortunately, the Trump administration continues to endanger millions of Americans by ignoring the most basic recommendations of medical professionals and recklessly downplaying the most effective tool we have to contain the pandemic; that is, simply wearing a mask.

This amendment is nothing more than listening to science and saving lives. Again, this morning, I participated in a hearing with Dr. Fauci and many others from the Trump administration. They were very clear: Masks work. Social distancing works. And we should listen to the scientists.

We are, as I mentioned earlier, at a pivotal moment in American history. We as elected officials have to respond in a transformational way. We have to stand up for people. We have to rethink the way we have done things in the past. The amendments I have offered begin the process of changing American priorities. I hope all three of those amendments will pass.

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