Home
RECENT NEWS
Thank you, Chair DeLauro.
I appreciate the work that Chair Wasserman Schultz and Ranking Member Carter have done this year on the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill. Thank you for reaching across the aisle to fund many projects important to our Members.
Unfortunately, this bill is based on a funding framework that the Majority Party developed without Republican support.
This difference of opinion on both funding priorities and policy positions could slow down our appropriations process this year.
There is nothing more important than funding our nation's military and veterans, and we must try to resolve these disagreements so that important bills like this one can be signed into law.
One area that is particularly concerning in this bill is that it fails to include long-standing language prohibiting the transfer of detainees currently at Guantanamo Bay to the United States.
I would like to Chair Roybal-Allard and Ranking Member Fleischmann for your work on this Homeland Security appropriations bill for fiscal year 2022.
I know that you both try to work together when it is possible, but unfortunately, there are just too many differences of opinion in this year's bill, and I oppose it in its current form.
To put it simply, the bill proposes funding levels and policies that fail to address the illegal immigration crisis we are currently experiencing in this country.
If we are going to get serious about stopping migrants from making the journey to the United States, then we should not be doing some of the things we see in this bill, such as:
Madam Chair, thank you for yielding.
These spending allocations will increase discretionary spending by hundreds of billions of dollars to an all-time high of $1.5 trillion.
This nearly 9% increase above fiscal year 2021 comes at a time of record-high deficits and debt:
- This month, the national debt reached an astonishing $28.3 trillion.
- In the first 8 months of this fiscal year, we have already borrowed $2.1 trillion.
We must exercise fiscal responsibility and return to reasonable levels of federal spending, now that the pandemic hopefully is nearing an end.
Although these allocations do not show the exact split between defense and non-defense programs, we know the topline is based on the president's budget. Those numbers included an enormous, 17% increase to non-defense programs. At the same time, the president's budget cut defense spending to below inflation.
