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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, $847 billion is a lot of money to spend on anything in 1 year, even in Washington terms. It is enough money, for instance, to make sure that not a single child goes hungry anywhere in the world ever again. It is enough money to end homelessness in America, provide free preschool and college for every American, build high-speed rail between every American city, and make childcare free for families.

Frankly, come up with five problems that plague parts of the world or parts of the country, design a solution, and you could probably solve all five for a year for $847 billion.

Here is another number that is big: $80 billion. Now, that is smaller than $847 billion but still a lot of money.

For $80 billion, you could build a high-speed railroad from New York to Washington, you could build 4,000 brandnew, state-of-the-art high schools in underserved communities, or you could hire--wait for it--a million public school teachers.

Here is why I tell you this. Next week, likely, this body is apparently going to be on a glidepath to pass an $847 billion Defense budget authorization for the current fiscal year. That is an $80 billion increase over last year. That is a 10-percent increase in just 1 year.

There has been very little public debate, and there is going to be very little debate on this floor over whether this is a good idea, about whether we should spend $80 billion on this or whether that $80 billion would be spent better on something else.

There is no debate, and there is going to be little debate here, in part, because the process of passing this bill is pretty broken.

Thanks to Senator Reed, the Armed Services Committee is a functioning committee. The Democrats and Republicans on that committee write this bill together with an open amendment process. If you are a member of the Armed Services Committee, thanks to Senator Reed and Senator Inhofe's leadership, you have a lot of opportunities to weigh in on the size and scope of the U.S. defense budget.

But the problem begins once the bill leaves the Armed Services Committee. Then the bill kind of disappears and gets changed. That is not Chairman Reed's fault. That is our collective decision to endorse that process.

The first thing that happens, particularly this year, is that many, many big, important pieces of policy get added to the Defense bill. Some of them are good policy, but some of them aren't. But there is no democratic process in which Members of this body get to review what is added to the Defense bill. There is no notification of rank-and-file Members so that we can provide input.

Again, as I understand it, the Armed Services Committee doesn't want to be in this position. They would rather just have a vote on their original bill, as we did for decades until just recently, when all of this extra policy got added to the Defense bill. But because today there are so few avenues for that other legislation to find a path to the floor, in large part because Republicans are using the filibuster to clog up the floor of the Senate, the Defense bill becomes this kind of evacuation helicopter carrying all the passengers they can fit in it.

For the first time this year, there are more pages in the Defense bill dedicated to nondefense items than to defense items.

This might be acceptable if Senators could offer amendments on the floor, remove parts of the bill we don't like, make other parts better--at least have our day. But the other new normal here is that there is going to be zero amendments, amendment votes, likely in the Senate debate.

It is the same problem. There are a handful of Republicans here who don't want to legislate, and so they are likely going to refuse to give consent to vote on amendments, and, plus, as I mentioned, they clog up the floor with filibuster votes, which means that you can't get big, important pieces of legislation done, and so they all find their way onto the Defense bill.

But I just want to plead with my colleagues for a moment that there is a better way to do this. We don't have to look too far in the past to see what a real debate on the Defense bill could look like. I just want all of my colleagues to think how much more interesting this place would be, how much healthier the Senate would be if we could have debates on Defense bills that looked like they did just 20 years ago.

I was just curious. So I literally just picked a year out of a hat from a slightly different generation in the Senate. I swear, I didn't cherry-pick the year. I just went back to 2000--the year 2000, right--a nice convenient date.

For the fiscal year 2000 Defense bill debate--which by the way, happened in May, not in December--the Senate took rollcall votes on 13 amendments. There were many amendments on contested, controversial policy that got full debate and full votes, and there were a whole bunch of other amendments that got voice votes in the Senate. But on the amendments that got full debate on the Senate floor and rollcall votes, there was an 87-12 vote on the legality of a new NATO strategic plan, a 49-50 vote to compel information from the Secretary of Health and Human Services on welfare reform, 48-52 on a War Powers Resolution for the war in the Balkans, 90-0 on a measure to encourage Balkan war crimes prosecution, 52-47 on a contested military promotion case, 40-60 to authorize a new round of base closures, 44-56 on a nuclear weapon retirement policy, 49-51 and then 51-49 to remove restrictions on prison labor products, 49-51 to remove restrictions on abortions on DOD property, 21-77 to limit funding for the Balkan war, 11-87 to limit the cost of the F-18 program, and 98-0 to support sanctions on Libya.

That is a lot of debate on really important foreign policy and national security policy on the floor of the Senate. That is virtually unthinkable in the modern Senate, and we are all poorer for it.

Back then, every Senator--not just leadership--saw themselves as having a coequal responsibility to set U.S. defense policy, and they required the process on the floor to reflect that belief.

In just that 1 year, 2000, Senators took three votes on the Balkan war, a vote on fighter costs, a vote on base closures, sanctions, and military promotions.

I go through this exercise just to explain to my colleagues that it just doesn't have to be like this. Those of us not on the Armed Services Committee or not in leadership don't have to be relegated to 70 rubberstamps with virtually no ability to have meaningful, realtime impact on the bill once it emerges from committee.

But I make this point for another reason as well. When there is limited debate and limited input from rank-and-file Members on a bill this big, on policy this important, I would argue that we miss the opportunity to be able to step back from this year-to-year creep of existing policy and ask ourselves: Are we doing it right?

Are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars in a way that actually protects this country and our national interests; or are we simply continuing down a path, continuing to invest and overinvest in weapons of war and underinvest in the tools that are necessary to prevent war?

And $847 billion is a ton of money, but so is $80 billion, this year's increase in authorized defense spending.

Now, let me say this: There is no doubt that there are legions of meritorious programs in this defense budget. Frankly, I publicly and proudly support many programs that are built and constructed in Connecticut: our submarine fleet, our helicopters, our fighter engines.

Why? Because I really do believe that the United States is the world's defender of democracy, the defender of the rule of law, the defender of international norms and free navigation. We have to be the world leader in kinetic, hard military power.

Ukraine is an example of why conventional military might still matters. Big nations, like Russia and China, are not content any longer to stay inside their boxes. They are, like pre-World War II times, seeking to revise their borders through invasion; and while the United States is currently at no risk of being invaded ourselves, we do still have a responsibility to step up and help others, to help reinforce that post-World War II order to ensure that wars of aggression do not become normalized.

But that post-World War II order is under threat not just because countries like Russia and China are using or threatening to use their militaries with alarming new frequency. The lion's share of threats to the United States and threats to world stability are often referred to not as conventional military threats but what is commonly referred to as asymmetric threats.

Now, this generally means they are threats that cannot be addressed just through military power--air power, armies, nuclear weapons, the kind of things that are funded in this Defense bill.

Let me give you some examples. Thousands of pages of think tank reports and endless hours of congressional testimony are dedicated to this lament that China's influence around the world is growing due to its willingness to aggressively invest in developing economies, critical mineral supplies, and supply chain routes. For instance, today China owns over 100 different international ports. They own a hundred ports outside of China in 60 different countries.

A new study revealed that China's development bank lent more money in sub-Saharan Africa than the development banks of the United States, Germany, Japan, and France combined. Now, to fix this, we need to be growing the size of U.S. development finance. But it is like pulling teeth to get Congress to extend the authorities or borrowing and capital limitations of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.

Last year, DFC announced that it had lent more money than any year before: $7.4 billion. That is a lot of money, $7.4 billion. This July, China's largest development bank announced that its 6-month total for a targeted set of urban infrastructure loans in the developing world, just a tiny piece of their overall portfolio, was $27 billion.

U.S. development finance isn't even playing in the same ballpark as Chinese development finance.

Here is another example of asymmetric power: It is kind of cliche these days to remind policymakers that information is power. But Ukraine's democracy is not just under attack from a foreign army; it is also under attack from misinformation. China, Russia, Iran, nonstate actors, they are spending billions of dollars all over the world spreading messages into democracies to try to create division and undermine faith in the rule of law.

That controversy around Colin Kaepernick's protest, that was mostly a creation of 500 Russian internet bots who posted an incredible 12,000 tweets inflaming public opinion.

China's global disinformation campaign is equally robust. For instance, the largest backer of Philippines' President--former President Rodrigo Duterte's illegal assassination campaign? Chinese social media farms.

But, once again, the United States just chooses asymmetry by letting these countries--Russia and China and others--dominate the information space.

Here is an example: the budget for RT, just one of Putin's international television and online news operations, $2.8 billion; the budget for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds all of our overseas broadcasting, $1 billion.

How do you compete with those kind of funding discrepancies?

Here is one more example. A few years ago, I was in Dublin, coincidentally, at the same time of a major telecommunications contract tender in Ireland. Ireland was making this key decision to award its internet backbone to a European firm or to Huawei, the Chinese communications conglomerate.

I was told by a very competent but, frankly, very overwhelmed defense attache assigned to our Irish Embassy that, over the prior few months, the Chinese Embassy had grown by leaps and bounds as dozens of new Chinese diplomats and provocateurs arrived in town to try to help sway the award for Huawei. Now, matched up against this legion of Chinese diplomats was this one guy, our single defense attache, maybe supported by a couple diplomats in the Embassy.

Now, he was competent, but he had no background in telecommunications policy--and, frankly, really nobody else there did either, and no extra help was on the way.

The same phenomenon plays out with energy projects. Other nations seamlessly integrate their energy resources with their diplomatic and national security efforts. There is no separation between the Middle East's oil and their foreign politics. The same for Russia or Iran or Venezuela. But U.S. energy executives are not representing the U.S. Government, which means our diplomats are on their own in conducting energy policy, which means they have an enormous amount of catching up to do against these other petro powers.

But for the first time, today, the United States is not the leading country when it comes to diplomatic posts around the world. That distinction now belongs to--guess who?--China. As our adversaries try to undermine democracies and rule of law and use their energy and technology resources to win allies, we simply don't have the means to keep up, another asymmetric advantage for our competitors.

We have no dedicated anticorruption or technology or energy policy corps within our foreign service. It is not because we don't need this capacity; it is just because we can't afford it. We lament this asymmetric advantage that other countries have on nondefense capabilities, but it is just a choice. It is a choice because we pass, year after year, these massive defense bills, and then we choose not to increase the capabilities that would actually protect us: the investments in nonmilitary capabilities.

Listen, I get it. I know this bill is going to pass, but why on Earth aren't we spending more time asking the tough questions about whether the balance of our spending on national security is right-sized to the actual threats the United States and our democratic allies face?

Yes, the Ukraine war is worth fighting, and it is expensive, but does it really make sense to spend 847 times more money on conventional military tools than we spend on winning the information war? Does it really make sense to add 10 percent to the defense budget while doing nothing to increase the size of our international development bank?

Do we really think that we are adequately responding to the actual array of threats posed to this country with a spending allocation that ends up with America having 11,000 diplomats, total, and 12,000 employees of military grocery stores?

American foreign policy today suffers from a crippling lack of imagination. American leaders complain about these asymmetric threats but refuse to acknowledge that this asymmetry exists only because we choose to do this: pass an $847 billion defense budget with a 10 percent, 1-year increase and do nothing, at the same time, to build the real capacities necessary to keep up with our adversaries' investments in nonmilitary tools of influence.

We could decide--this Congress could decide--to build a massive, modern international development bank. We could decide--this Congress could decide--not to let RT dominate the international information space. We could decide--all of us, this Congress--to have enough diplomats around the world to be able to fight the fights that matter to us.

We should imagine this world in which we fight toe to toe with the Chinese and the Russians and other adversaries in the development, information, technology, energy, and diplomatic spheres. We should imagine that world and then put in place a plan to achieve it.

Asymmetry is a choice. It is a choice for our adversaries, and it is a choice for us. And it is a consequence of our entire budget--for development aid, anti-propaganda efforts, democracy promotion, human rights advancement, humanitarian assistance, and diplomacy--being about the same size as the 1-year increase in the defense budget.

And $847 billion is a lot of money to spend without a real debate on the Senate floor, without the ability to offer amendments. I think this country would be better off, I think our security would be better protected, if we just took a step back, asked some hard questions about how we allocate money within our national security budget, and took the time to have a real floor debate with real input about it all.

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