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Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, the Senate is now debating an $886 billion Defense authorization bill, and unless there are major changes to that bill, I intend to vote against it. Let me take a few minutes to explain why.

I think everybody in our country knows that we face enormous crises.

As a result of climate change, our planet is experiencing unprecedented and rising temperatures. Along with the rest of the world, we need to make major investments to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy. If we do not do that--not only America but China and countries all over the world--the planet we are leaving our kids and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and precarious. In fact, there are some who wonder whether the planet will continue to exist in years to come unless we move aggressively on this existential threat.

But it is not only climate change. Our healthcare system is broken, and it is dysfunctional--not a secret. Most Americans know that. While the insurance companies and the drug companies make hundreds of billions of dollars in profits, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Unbelievably, our life expectancy, which is already lower than most major countries, is declining. Today, we have a massive shortage of doctors, nurses, mental health practitioners, and dentists--something that the committee I chair, the HELP Committee, is trying to address. But it is a reality today that our healthcare system is broken and dysfunctional.

Our educational system is teetering.

While we have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any major country, millions of parents in Vermont, Nevada, and all over this country are unable to find affordable and quality childcare. It is a major, major crisis which is only going to become worse as a result of the cliff that the childcare folks are going to be experiencing in a few months.

But it is not just childcare. When we talk about education, we should appreciate that the number of our young people who graduate from college today is falling further and further behind other countries. In other words, we need to have the best educated country on Earth in order to compete internationally. Yet other countries are seeing a greater percentage of their young people graduating college. One of the reasons is the high cost of college. Many young people do not want to go $50,000 or $100,000 in debt to get a college or graduate school degree. Today, we have 45 million Americans who are struggling under the weight of student debt--something that President Biden, I, and others have been trying to deal with.

But it is not only climate. It is not only healthcare. It is not only education. Today, all over this country, we are seeing a massive crisis in terms of low-income and affordable housing. While gentrification is causing rents to soar in many parts of our country, some 600,000 Americans are homeless. A few blocks away from right here in the Nation's Capital, there are people sleeping out in the streets. And we have some 18 million people who are spending more than half of their limited incomes on housing.

So that is what the country faces. We have a planetary crisis in terms of climate change. Our healthcare system is broken and dysfunctional. Our educational system is teetering. Our housing stock is totally inadequate. These are just some of the crises facing our country.

What is very clear, I think, to the American people and many people here in the Senate and those in the House is that we are not addressing those crises. We don't have any pretense--we are not addressing those crises. When is the last time the Presiding Officer has heard a serious debate here about how we address climate change, how we build up affordable housing, how we reform the healthcare system? It is not taking place. We are not addressing this. So that is one political reality that exists here in the Nation's Capital.

But there is another reality, and that is the reality of the Pentagon and military spending, and that is a whole other story. Every year, with seemingly little regard for the strategic picture facing our country, this body, the House and the Senate, votes to increase the military budget. It just happens. We don't worry about people sleeping on the street. We don't worry about people who don't have any healthcare. We don't worry about people who can't afford prescription drugs. Every year, the military budget--hey, more money.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over. Tens of thousands of American troops have returned home. Yet the Pentagon's budget continues to go up. Every year, despite sometimes very contentious partisan fights on all manner of things--you name it, big fights going on--Congress somehow comes together very quietly, with little debate, to vote for the one thing they agree on, and that is more and more money for the Pentagon.

Right now, despite all of the enormous needs facing working families in this country, over half of the Federal discretionary budget goes to the military. Got it? Over half of the Federal discretionary budget goes to the military.

I support a strong military. People don't have to convince me why we need a strong military. But I will oppose this legislation, this Defense authorization bill, for four major reasons.

First, more military spending right now is unnecessary. The United States remains the world's dominant military power and is in no danger of losing that position. Alone, we account for roughly 40 percent of global military spending. This comes despite the end of the war in Afghanistan and despite the fact that the United States now spends more on the military than the next 10 countries combined, most of which are our allies. We spend more than the next 10 countries combined, most of which are our allies. Last year, we spent more than 3 times what China is spending on the military, and more than 10 times what Russia spent.

While this year's National Defense Authorization Act would merely match the Pentagon's recordbreaking request, in most recent years, Congress has seen fit to give the Department of Defense more money than it even asks for. Imagine that. The 85 million people who are uninsured--we don't help them. People can't afford the high cost of prescription drugs--hardly doing anything on that. People sleeping out on the streets--can't do that. Kids can't afford to go to college-- can't do that. But we have, year after year, given the Pentagon more money than they have even requested, requiring them to submit ``wish lists'' of items to Congress; in other words, tell us what more you need.

The Pentagon is routinely given so much taxpayer money that it literally doesn't know what to do with all the money Congress has thrown at them. According to the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, over an 11-year period, the Pentagon returned an astonishing $128 billion in excess funds to the Treasury. In other words, we gave them so much money that they couldn't even spend it, and they had to return some of it.

So that is reason No. 1 why I oppose this legislation.

No. 2, the Pentagon cannot keep track of the dollars it already has, leading to massive waste, fraud, and abuse in the sprawling military- industrial complex. The Pentagon accounts for about two-thirds of all Federal contracting activity, obligating more money every year than all civilian Federal Agencies combined. Yet the Department of Defense remains the only major Federal Agency that cannot pass an independent audit more than 30 years after Congress required them to do so.

So we are throwing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into the Pentagon. Thirty years ago, Congress said: We want an audit; we want to know what is going on--a reasonable request. It has only been 30 years, and we still have not gotten an independent audit.

Last year, the Department of Defense was unable to account for over half of its assets, which are in excess of $3 trillion, or roughly 78 percent of what the entire Federal Government owns. The Government Accountability Office, the GAO, reports that the Department of Defense still cannot accurately track its finances or capture and post transactions to the current accounts.

Each year, auditors find billions of dollars in the Pentagon's proverbial couch cushions--just money lying around, you know, that pops up here and there. In fiscal 2022, Navy auditors found $4.4 billion in untracked inventory--couldn't find it, but there was $4.4 billion-- while Air Force auditors identified $5.2 billion worth of variances in its general ledger.

These problems are why Senator Grassley and I have again introduced our Audit the Pentagon Act, with a number of cosponsors, which would force the Pentagon to get serious about their shortcomings by reducing by 1 percent the budget of any DOD component that cannot pass an audit. I don't think that is an unreasonable request.

A meaningful effort to address this waste should be undertaken before Congress throws more money at the Pentagon. Yet this absolutely necessary oversight is again missing from this bill. So it doesn't matter. Next year, we will learn that tens and tens of billions of dollars can't be accounted for. So what is the problem?

In June, the GAO found that in the preceding year, 1 single year, DOD's largest acquisition programs had seen cost estimates rise by $37 billion. It goes on and on and on. They come up with an estimate for a weapons system, and then they say: Oh, sorry, it turns out it is going to cost a lot more than we told you. This comes after decades in which we spent more than $2 trillion on ill-considered wars, in my view, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Somehow, despite this incredible record of waste and fraud, the military-industrial complex escapes meaningful scrutiny.

The third point I want to make in opposition is that much of this additional military spending will go to line the pockets of hugely profitable defense contractors. It is corporate welfare by a different name. Almost half of the Pentagon budget goes to private contractors, some of whom are exploiting their monopoly positions and the trust granted them by the United States to line their pockets. Repeated investigations by the DOD inspector general, the GAO, and CBS News have uncovered numerous instances of contractors massively overcharging the Department of Defense, helping boost these companies' profit margins to nearly 40 percent and sometimes as high as over 4,000 percent, while costing U.S. taxpayers hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. TransDigm, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon are among the offenders, dramatically overcharging taxpayers, while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.

Just one example, Lockheed Martin received $46 billion in unclassified Federal contracts last year, returned $11 billion to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, and paid its CEO $25 million. These companies are fully reliant on the U.S. taxpayer, yet their CEOs make over 100 times more than the Secretary of Defense and 500 percent more than the average newly enlisted servicemember.

TransDigm, the company behind the over 4,000-percent markup on spare parts, touted $3.1 billion in profits on $5.4 billion of net sales, almost boasting to investors about just how fully it was fleecing the taxpayers.

Indeed, over the past two decades, major defense contractors have paid billions of dollars in fines or related settlements for fraud or misconduct. Almost every major defense contractor has had to pay fines for fraud or misconduct. Just the other day--people may have seen it in the papers--the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton was fined $377 million for overcharging the Defense Department. Yet these contracts never dry up.

That is why I introduced an amendment to this year's NDAA to require the Secretary of Defense to produce an updated report on defense contractor fraud. That amendment was not included in what we will be voting on.

Here is maybe the major point that I want to make: If the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, has taught us anything--and let us not forget for one minute that that pandemic cost us over 1 million lives--it is that national security relies on much more than just a strong military.

It is funny, as chairman of the HELP Committee, a couple of months ago, we had those people who are responsible for protecting this country against future pandemics before us. And the question that everybody asked them, Democrat and Republican, is: Hey, are we prepared for the next pandemic that is likely to come? Without exception, the leaders of the government Agencies whose job is to protect us for the next pandemic said: No, we are not prepared.

By the way, there are some right now who want to take money away from the Centers for Disease Control in this particular bill.

The point is that when you lose over 1 million people to a pandemic and when the scientists tell us there is a good chance that another one may come, that is a national security issue.

True security--if we are really looking at what true security is about--it means everything that we can do to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

True security is that we address the crisis of a declining life expectancy. The gap between the lifespan of the wealthy and the working class is over 10 years. If you are working class in this country, you are going to die 10 years shorter than the wealthy. Is that not an issue of national security? Do we not want to make sure that all of our people, whether they are rich or poor or middle class, have the right to live full and productive and healthy lives? I think so. That is called national security.

National security has to do with the issue of education for our kids. How are we secure if our young people, from childcare to graduate school, are not getting the quality of education?

There are millions of children who today, in America, as we speak, are food insecure. There are days that go by when they are hungry. How do we talk about national security and not talk about the crisis of childhood hunger, not to mention childhood poverty in general?

How do we talk about national security when people are sleeping out on the street?

How do we, in any sense of the word, talk about national security without understanding the weather in Texas, in the southwest, is now hitting recordbreaking levels? People are dying from the heat. Oceans are getting hotter. We are looking at drought. We are looking at extreme weather disturbances. My own State, just several weeks ago, experienced the worst natural disaster, torrential rainfalls that we haven't seen since 1927. That is national security. Whether people get forced out of their homes because of flooding, die from heat stroke-- that is called national security.

This body--the Senate--could decide to have one or two fewer ballistic missile submarines, saving almost $15 billion over the next decade. And we could put that money--and it would go a long way--toward housing the homeless or feeding the 5 million children in this country who are food insecure. Instead, day after day, here in Washington, many of my colleagues tell the American people that we just don't have the money. We can't do what every other major country on Earth does--guarantee healthcare to all people; we can't provide affordable housing; we can't provide affordable childcare; we can't provide nutrition to kids in America who are hungry. We just can't afford to do any of those things. But come to the military budget and all the lobbyists around here from the defense contractors, my God, we can't stop throwing money at them.

So what I would say is that the time is long overdue for our country to get our national priorities right, and one small step forward would be to say no to this very bloated and wasteful military budget and start reordering our priorities so that we pay attention to the needs of the middle class and working class and low-income people rather than just defense contractors.

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