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Floor Speech
Mr. President, first of all, let's--since I have the opportunity: We all revere and respect those men and women who have served and sacrificed to defend our liberty. That is completely nonpartisan. We prove it day in and day out. We prove it by how much money we spend on veterans' benefits.
So I certainly appreciate the Senator from Connecticut, his advocacy. I advocate for veterans as well. It is interesting, though, this unanimous consent request is very similar, if not identical, to the same unanimous consent request offered on October 9 of 2025 by the Senator from Connecticut.
At that point in time, responding to it, that unanimous consent, the Senator from Mississippi--the then- and now-current chair of the Armed Services Committee--stated, and I quote:
[M]y colleague is asking for an entitlement that does amount to a double benefit and that we cannot afford. We are talking between $9 billion and $10 billion on the Department of Defense authorization act. And we are talking about . . . a bill, a piece of legislation, that really belongs in another jurisdiction.
I am assuming he was talking about the Veterans' Affairs Committee.
We cannot possibly add another 9 billion to 10 billion of entitlement money to this Defense Authorization Act.
And that is the reason that in Democrat majorities and Republican majorities, House Democrat majorities and Senate Democrat majorities, and in Democrat administrations, this legislation has never been accepted because we simply cannot afford it.
The chairman of Armed Services went on to say:
Historically, Congress has provided permanent new benefits only after we have identified an offset, savings of a similar amount.
There is no such offset identified in this unanimous consent request. And when we do not identify offsets, that means $10 billion has come out of readiness, out of the strength of our military to defend ourselves during the most dangerous time we have had since World War II. And with that logic, the chairman of Armed Services, the Senator from Mississippi, objected to the Senator from Connecticut's unanimous consent request.
Now, what has changed is we now have a score on this specific bill. When the Senator from Mississippi was objecting last time, he was quoting a $9 billion to $10 billion score. We just got the score on this one. Now, it is $70 billion to $75 billion.
Again, we all revere the finest among us. The men and women of the military that I know didn't serve and sacrifice oblivious to the fact that we are mortgaging our children's future. They served and sacrificed to secure our children's future. So we can't just come down here and talk about how much we love vets and how we want to support them. We also have to look at the reality of the situation in dollars and cents. We are $39 trillion in debt. Over the next decade, it will be $60 trillion. We have to look at the dollars and cents.
So, again, this unanimous consent request went from an assumed cost of 10 billion to now 70 billion, which reminds me an awful lot of the PACT Act, which I voted for and supported. But when that was first being discussed, it was called the burn pit legislation.
My former chief of staff served in Iraq; he was impacted by it. But I remember discussions--these were informal. I don't have anything formally written, but back in early discussions of the burn pit legislation, we were being told it was going to be $1 billion or $2 billion a year.
When the House passed their version of the PACT Act, the CBO score was for $322 billion over 10 years. The Senate got its hands on that piece of legislation, and the score was $667 billion. The current window is over $700 billion. That is not chump change. That is approaching a trillion dollars over 10 years.
Now, again, it is not like we are spending less on veterans, even though our veteran population is declining. In 2019, we spent $200 billion on veterans' benefits. Again, now, their retirement is through the Defense Department. This is just benefits for VA. Two hundred billion dollars, that equates to about $11,500 per veteran. This was before the pandemic--so $200 billion, $11,500 per vet.
This year, we will spend about $435 billion, so it has more than doubled, and our cost per vet is up to $28,000 per veteran. Somebody has got to look at this.
We are $177 billion for veterans' benefits above and beyond what we spent in 2019, fully inflated for inflation. There is no other account in the Federal Government that is that out of whack, comparing 2019 fully inflated.
So this is not the way to pass this legislation. The Senator from Connecticut has all these cosponsors. Fine. Go through the committee process. Scrutinize this. Take a look at the score, take a look at what the history of this is. It is not like we are the first Congress that reveres the members of the military.
For some reason, they differentiate between somebody who has 20 years of service or less than. Let's look at that. Let's debate it. Let's bring it through the committee process, regular order. And then if it has that great support, I might even vote for it.
But let's go through the process to see whether these policies make sense, whether there truly is double-dipping, whether there is a better way of handling--by the way, I have been told the Department of War is looking at this exact issue. They have reverence for the finest among us as well.
But this is not the way to do this, not by unanimous consent request. It was objected to in October, and I am going to object to it right now.
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Mr. JOHNSON. I agree. Our job is to recognize the fact that we are $39 trillion in debt on the back of $60 trillion, with the Social Security trust fund running out during that timeframe.
Our job would be, then, to go through the regular order process of taking this before the committee. If it has such broad bipartisan support, fine, but, again, similar efforts along these lines have failed in the past with Democrat majorities in both the House and the Senate. There is something about this that concerns people. So vet it out in the committee process. We are trying to bypass that process by unanimous consent requests. This is not the way to produce good legislation, not when we are $39 trillion in debt.
So for all the other reasons I mentioned in my previous objection,
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