Adam Smith

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I too urge adoption of the en bloc amendments and yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Strickland).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), who chairs the Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Norcross), the chair of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), who is the chair of the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Escobar), a member of the committee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney), the chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Virginia (Mrs. Luria), the vice chair of the committee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi), the chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Substantively, I reiterate my initial remarks. I think this is a good bill that was put together. You have heard a lot of comments from the individual subcommittee chairs. Many other Members also contributed significant and important policy to this piece of legislation that gives us the opportunity to properly exercise oversight of the Pentagon, which is our job. This bill does an excellent job of that, and I think, as I mentioned, we have made some progress in recent years. The one big point I did not emphasize sufficiently at the start of my remarks is how important innovation and new technologies are right now. I don't think there has been a time in the history of warfare where things have been changing as rapidly. We have certainly seen that play out on the battlefield in Ukraine but also in other fights that have happened in smaller conflicts in Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Middle East. You have to develop the new, best innovative technology, and as anyone would recognize, the Pentagon is not typically good at moving fast. It is a large bureaucracy. It takes them time to process ideas. What we have done is we have put forth innovative legislation to move that along faster so that we can develop the better technologies, take advantage of drone technology, take advantage of AI, and make sure that our systems are secure. That has really made a huge difference to make sure that we get the most out of the money we spend and that we are in the best position to have the technologies that we need. So, a number of these policies have made a huge difference. I will use the balance of my time to thank six members of our committee on the Democratic side who are retiring at the end of this Congress: Congress Members Langevin, Cooper, Speier, Brown, Murphy, and Kahele. I thank them very much for their service. As you have heard many times, the cornerstone of this committee is our bipartisan approach and our commitment to regular order, to sending our bills through the normal process in committee, having markups, debates, and then doing the same on the floor in a bipartisan way, which makes an enormous difference. These Members have contributed to that. I will especially recognize a couple of Members because a number have served for a long time on the committee. Jim Langevin is the chairman of the subcommittee with the really complicated name that I have to have written down to remember, but it has to do with cyber and intelligence matters. Jim has dove into these issues. When I talk, as I did, about innovative technologies, it is his subcommittee that focuses on putting us in the best position to deal with artificial intelligence, to figure out how to use directed-energy weapons and drones, to do the innovation that is crucial. Jim's knowledge level on this is above anybody in Congress. He has done an outstanding job over, I guess it is, 22 years as a Member of Congress and now a subcommittee chair. His leadership has been invaluable in those crucial issues. Jim Cooper, also retiring, is a subcommittee chair. He is very responsible for getting us to properly focus on space. There is a lot of talk about the Space Force. Certainly, that is part of it, but that was never really the entire point. The point was that space has become crucial in modern warfare. Literally, everything we do gets shut down if we don't have robust access to our space assets. Recognize the importance of that and how much that has changed, certainly in the last 50 years but even in the last 10. Chairman Cooper has worked with now- Ranking Member Rogers, also a past chairman of that subcommittee, to make this happen. Jim's intelligence and leadership have made a huge difference in those issues. Jackie Speier is retiring as the chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee. It is impossible to overstate the work she has done to look after the men and women who serve in our forces, most notably, of course, with her commitment to battling sexual assault and to getting the major sexual assault reform passed, which we passed last year, to set up a special prosecutor who will focus on sexual assault cases. That was a 10-year effort. A lot of people, when they get involved in politics, they get frustrated that things aren't happening. They don't happen quickly. They get frustrated by the whole process. I have come up with the saying that, in politics and public policy, you have to be patient and persistent. Nobody personifies that better than Jackie Speier. She was absolutely doggedly persistent in getting the changes necessary to help improve the way we handle sexual assault and on a wide range of other issues that have helped protect the personnel who serve in our military. Lastly, I specifically thank Anthony Brown, a past vice chair of the committee who has worked so hard on diversity issues. We were able, 2 years ago now, to finally get passed and put in place a commission to change the names of the military bases in this country and facilities, as well--not just base names, but those buildings, streets, and a whole bunch of other things that had been named after white supremacist Confederate traitors. He did the work to get that through the entire process, all the way to the point of having to override the President's veto to get that done. Now we have a commission that is working on this issue. Certainly, it is crucial that they change the names, but what the commission is doing is they have held hearings all across the country in the communities where these bases are named to talk about the history, about how we got to this point, what is it that we are actually talking about, how these bases weren't actually named immediately after the Civil War--they were named at the turn of the 20th century when there was an effort to reestablish white supremacy--to really educate and include the community in the process and, ultimately, in the names that were selected. That never would have happened without Anthony's hard work. We have some outstanding members of the committee leading us this year. I appreciate their service. Again, I thank Ranking Member Rogers and the Republican staff. We have worked well together--not that we don't disagree. We absolutely disagree frequently, but we do so in a way that allows us to resolve those differences, which is the essence of how a representative democracy is not just supposed to work but how it must work if it is to survive. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of that process. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to support this bill. It is an outstanding product. Please vote ``yes.'' I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Takano).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1224, I offer amendments en bloc.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I urge adoption of the en bloc amendments, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 7900.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes. Mr. Speaker, we have before us today the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023. As most people know, we have passed the National Defense Authorization Act every year for 62 straight years, and I urge Members to do it again this year. I will start by thanking Ranking Member Rogers and the minority. We have once again managed to work together in a bipartisan fashion to craft this bill in committee during a roughly 16-, 16\1/2\-hour markup in which we entertained roughly a thousand amendments and a whole bunch of different ideas and proposals to create this product. I think the legislative process is enormously important. We continue it here with 1,200 amendments submitted to the Rules Committee, 650, roughly, in order. I am told that is actually a new record for a piece of House legislation, a record we weren't necessarily looking to set, but it does reflect the participation in this process of this entire body of an incredibly important piece of legislation, and we can't lose track of that fact. This is the bill that enables the Congress to exercise oversight of the Pentagon. In this year's budget, we authorize $850 billion. It is usually somewhere, by the time we are done, around a 3,000-page bill. It is an incredibly important piece of legislation that gives us the power and the ability to exercise that important oversight authority of the Pentagon and Department of Defense. We have done a lot of good work in this year's bill. I think the focus, as we go forward, is obviously the men and women who serve and making sure that they have the tools they need to do the jobs that we have given them to do. We could have a robust debate about what those jobs should be, but I think we can all agree that once that debate is settled and the tasks are assigned, the men and women who serve must have the tools and the support from us that they need to do that job. This year, it has been particularly challenging, given the rate of inflation. Our bill reflects that, giving some additional support to our servicemembers and their families to deal with housing costs and also additional bonus pay to deal with that inflation. So, we support the servicemen and -women through our financial support and through making sure that their needs are met. The other big issue is making sure that the Pentagon is spending the money wisely. As many of you have heard, I have argued frequently that the amount of money is not as important as how we spend it. Over the course of the last couple of decades, we have struggled with the number of programs that have been over budget and underperforming. We have, over the course of the last 6 years, put in place critical acquisition reform and procurement reform to put the Pentagon in a better position to take advantage of innovative new technologies and, crucially, competition to make sure that we get a better product. We are beginning to see the fruits of that success. In programs like the B-21 and the GBSD, whatever one thinks of those programs, they are on time, on budget, and actually meeting their requirements, which is a significant change. That is due, in large part, to a lot of the legislation that we passed here. I think we have put together an excellent product. In particular, I thank my staff and also the Rules Committee staff. The Rules Committee staff had to sift through those 1,200 amendments, give them the attention that they are due, and make sure that the process worked. They did an amazing job working with our staff. I thank my staff on the Armed Services Committee, both on the Republican side and the Democratic side, and our bipartisan staff for doing an outstanding job. I recognize one of our staff members not able to be with us today who is normally here. Sharma gave birth to her second child yesterday. She wishes she were here, but she is also, I think, pretty happy where she is. So, I want to pass along that congratulations. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, Washington, DC, June 30, 2022. Hon. Adam Smith, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, Washington, DC. Dear Chairman Smith: I am writing to you concerning H.R. 7900, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023. There are certain provisions in the legislation that fall within the Rule X jurisdiction of the Committee on Agriculture. In the interest of permitting your committee to proceed expeditiously to floor consideration of this important bill, I am willing to waive this committee's right to sequential referral. I do so with the understanding that by waiving consideration of the bill, the Committee on Agriculture does not waive any future jurisdictional claim over the subject matters contained in the bill that fall within its Rule X jurisdiction. I request that you urge the Speaker to name members of this committee to any conference committee that is named to consider such provisions. Please place this letter into the committee report on H.R. 7900 and into the Congressional Record during consideration of the measure on the House floor. Thank you for the cooperative spirit in which you have worked regarding this matter and others between our respective committees. Sincerely, David Scott, Chairman.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1224, I call up the bill (H.R. 7900) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2023 for military activities of the Department of Defense and for military construction, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Texas.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1224, I offer amendments en bloc.