Jim Talent

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet on Tuesday, March 14, 2006, at 2:30 p.m., on Wall Street Perspective on Telecommunications.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session on Monday, March 14, 2006, at 10 a.m., in 215 Dirksen Senate Office Building, to hear testimony on ``Administrative Challenges Facing the Social Security Administration.''

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 14, 2006, at 2:15 p.m. to hold a business meeting.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on National Parks be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 14 at 2:30 p.m. The purpose of the hearing is to review the President's proposed budget for the National Parks Service for fiscal year 2007.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Personnel be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on March 14, 2006, at 2:30 p.m., in open session to receive testimony on health benefits and programs in review of the defense authorization request for fiscal year 2007.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on March 14, 2006, at 9:30 a.m., in open session to receive testimony from combatant commanders on their military strategy and operational requirements, in review of the defense authorization request for fiscal year 2007 and the future years defense program.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry be authorized to conduct a hearing during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 14, 2006 at 10 a.m. in SR-328A, Russell Senate Office Building. The purpose of this hearing will be to discuss the following nominations: Dr. Gale Buchanan to be Under Secretary of Agriculture for Research, Education and Economics; Mr. Marc Kesselman to be General Counsel of the Department of Agriculture; Mr. Boyd Rutherford to be an Assistant Secretary of Agriculture; and Ms. Linda Strachan to be an Assistant Secretary of Agriculture.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet to conduct a hearing on ``Consolidation in the Oil and Gas Industry: Raising Prices?'' on Tuesday, May 14, 2006 at 10:30 a.m. in Dirksen room 226. Panel I: Tom Miller, Attorney General for the State of Iowa, Des Moines, IA; David Boies, Chairman, Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP, Armonk, NY; Joseph M. Alioto, Partner, Alioto Law Firm, San Francisco, CA; Severin Borenstein, E.T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA; and Tom Greene, Senior Assistant Attorney General for the State of California, Sacramento, CA. Panel II: Mr. John Hofmeister, President, Shell Oil Company, Houston, TX; Mr. Ross Pillari, President and Chief Executive Officer, BP America, Inc., Chicago, IL; Mr. James Mulva, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, ConocoPhillips, Houston, TX; Mr. Rex Tillerson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, ExxonMobil Corp., Irving, TX; Mr. David O'Reilly, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Chevron Corp., San Ramon, CA; and Mr. Bill Klesse, Chief Executive Officer, Valero Energy Corp., San Antonio, TX.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Sure.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I thank the chairman and the ranking member for arranging the debate on this amendment. I call up an amendment we have at the desk, Talent-Lieberman amendment No. 3011.

Mr. TALENT. I ask unanimous consent to add Senator Carper as a cosponsor of the amendment.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, this amendment is a rather simple one. It raises the number in the budget for defense up to what the administration proposed. The budget resolution, as it came out of committee, would have reduced the amount of money requested for national defense by $3 billion. This restores that. It is in my judgment, as I said often on the Senate floor, not all we need to do but it is a first step. We have to understand context here. The number the President submitted was itself almost $4 billion the President submitted was itself almost $4 billion less than what only a year and half ago the President and the administration said they would need for fiscal 2007. Under the pressure from the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Defense has had to reduce its request for the last 2 fiscal years by an amount totaling almost $10 billion and, at the same time, has reduced the amount it said it is going to request for the next 5 years by almost $670 billion--this while we are in a war and this while our responsibilities around the world and even outside the global war on terror have never been greater is a mistake. I think the first step to correcting that mistake is to pass this bipartisan amendment and restore at least what the President has requested for fiscal 2007. Let me give some history, some context. We need to go back to the early 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that time, there were concerns about the budget as well and the Government took those concerns out on the national defense. All throughout the 1990s, the Defense budget shrunk. It was the only part of the budget that shrunk. There were some years it shrunk in normal dollars, not even just as against inflation. There was a belief at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union that we were in an era of peace and we would not need to spend as much on the national defense. Certainly, that was true with regards to certain parts of the national defense. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true with the Defense budget. I will explain that in a minute. First, in order to accommodate those shrinking budget there were reductions in the force structure. The number of people we have in the Department was cut across the board by anywhere from a quarter to a third. The problem with that is we anticipated we would need the men and women in America's military less with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it turns out that we needed them more. It turned out that history had not ended--it had been frozen during the time of the Cold War, and it thawed out with a vengeance. All the regional and ethnic rivalries that had been submerged in the bipolar nature of the Cold War era came to the surface. We had to deploy our men and women in conventional exercises of one kind or another far more in the 1990s than we had to do in the Cold War decades in the years before. What happens when you have fewer people and you use them more? You stress the force, you stress the people, you stress the equipment, you increase the operation and maintenance budgets. In an era when we thought we would be able to save money on defense, we actually had to spend more, and increasingly the urgent crowded out the important. Money was put in O&M in order to keep the tip of the spear sharp, if you will, while the rest of the spear rusted. We took, for many years as a practical matter, a procurement holiday. We did not buy the equipment we needed to buy to recapitalize the platforms, which is what we in the Armed Services Committee call the weapons, the trucks, the support equipment that the men and women in America's military use. In the 15 years from 1975 to 1990, we typically bought 78 scout and attack helos. In the years from 1991 to 2000, we bought, on average, seven. Whereas, we would buy 2,083, tanks, artillery, and other armored vehicles; we bought, on average, 145. In some cases we acquired about 10 percent of the platforms that we had bought in the 15 years previous to 1990. As a result, the capital equipment that the military is using is old. Let us talk about some of our aircraft: B-52 bombers are 44 years old; C-130 transports, 33 years old; and KC-135 tankers, 43\1/2\ years old. I could give similar statistics for the other parts of the services as well. The number of ships we have is going down. In the 1980s we aimed at a 600-ship Navy, and we are now below 300. If we continue at the current shipbuilding levels, we will get down to 200 or below. That is not consistent with the national security of the United States. But what happened? The Bush administration took over, and to their credit, they raised Defense spending above inflation. There were modest increases in the early part of this decade, and part of the hope was we could recapitalize the infrastructure and make up for that procurement holiday. For a lot of reasons, that didn't happen. The operational tempo continued to grow. We all know about the military employment level in the global war on terror. There has been what we call mission creep in other areas as well. Think about the tsunami that occurred about a year and a half ago. It was American military forces that were the structure through which we delivered that relief. We have increased the homeland security mission, the international humanitarian relief operation, special operations, ongoing training operations. The operational tempo was at a historic high, and that ate up a lot of the increases. Personnel costs: We have great men and women in the military. They are very highly skilled people. There is no such thing as a ``grunt'' anymore in America's military. Today, you have highly skilled people, and we owe it to them, and we must pay them accordingly. Personnel costs are now $17 billion more per year, adjusted for inflation than in 1999. Seventeen billion dollars more comes out of the hide of the rest of the budget. China is 5 to 10 years ahead of schedule in what we figure would be a rearmament process. I am not saying China needs to become an enemy of the United States. I hope that doesn't happen. I believe it need not happen. But they are clearly attempting to develop a military capability to exclude the United States from the Western Pacific, should she choose to do so. And the thing that is more likely to encourage them in that ambition than anything else is the reality or even the perception of American weakness. In addition, we now have the new generation of platforms coming on line. Remember, platforms are ships, planes, tanks, trucks, and other kinds of support equipment. For the generation of platforms that the new generation of servicemen and women are going to be using to replace the old ones, it is essential that we complete the development of these programs and that we buy out the platforms that we have proposed to buy. The DDX destroyer and the Joint Strike Fighter combat systems, which is the heart of America's Army, its F-22, air-to-air superiority fighter, the new aircraft carriers, the submarines which are essential to our national defense strategy both for intelligence and also in the western Pacific, all of these are coming online in the next few years. Even with the President's submitted proposal, we cannot purchase the required new generation of platforms. For all of these reasons, I have been urging for months--in fact, my advocacy on this point goes back to 1993, when I was a new Congressman in the House--I have been warning that we needed to spend more on defense. I need to point out to the Senate that this is an obligation of the United States we cannot escape. It is similar to the basic capital assets of a company. You have to keep it up. It is not optional to allow the military equipment that our men and women use to age and eventually to collapse. We are going to pay this bill. The longer we wait, the bigger the bill will be. That is one of the reasons why the investments which the President has proposed and which this Congress has provided in the last 5 years have not been enough even to allow us to tread water. We have continued to slip backward because we did not do what we needed to do in the 1990s. What do we need to do now? There are a number of us on both sides of the aisle who are proposing, first of all, to restore the number the President has proposed. I would like to see us go above that in this fiscal year, about $3 billion more than what the President has proposed. That is the amount that the Department of Defense said it needed for fiscal 2007 in the fall of 2004. That was the last budget projection we got from the Department of Defense that was unaffected by the stricture of the OMB. I think we need to go to that point. I said that in speeches on the floor of the Senate last fall. A number of us sent a letter to the President urging him to submit a budget at that number. That is about $443 billion apart from the spending on the Department of Energy that is also included in the defense budget. Then I think we need to take next year for a searching and honest review of what the Defense budget needs to be in the near future. I am not the only one who has proposed that. There are a number of Senators on both sides of the aisle and the Armed Services Committee who suggest that we need a systematic increase in the Defense budget. It is now about 3.7 or 3.8 percent of the gross domestic product. Let me emphasize that. I don't want that figure to slip by without people marking it. We are spending about 3.8 percent of the gross domestic product on national defense. That includes the supplemental, 3.8 percent in a time of war. Whatever else is causing the deficit--and there are obviously disagreements on the floor of this body, and we just witnessed an eloquent debate highlighting those disagreements--whatever else is causing it, the Department of Defense and military budget is not. That figure is historically very low. It is much lower than the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter was President. To try to save money on defense, to believe that you are saving money by reducing the Defense budget below the minimum, is a classic example of being pennywise and pound foolish because the bill comes due. We do not have the option of not meeting our responsibilities in the world today. The reality, the perception but much less the reality of American weakness encourages instability in the world. Instability in the world is antithetical to the kind of security that people need for economic growth. So I can put it on as low a level as possible. If we do not adequately support the national defense, we are certainly going to get ourselves into bigger economic trouble. American weakness leads to conflict abroad, conflict abroad can lead to war, and war is very bad for the national deficit. So we need this searching review. We can have that. We can decide where we need to be structurally beginning next year. I think the Armed Services Committee is going to do that. I want to close on a hopeful note. This is well within our capability. This is a great nation, a strong nation. If the Government will meet its obligations and do what it is supposed to do, the people will drive the prosperity of this country. They will produce the wealth on which they depend, on which this Government depends, to sustain those programs that are necessary to protect our security and also help the weak and the helpless among us. We had a funeral for President Reagan in the recent past. He laid in State. And I thought Members of both parties did a wonderful job eulogizing him. We should learn the lesson of history that his administration taught us. He understood the importance of American power in the world. When he became President, we also had gone through a time when the forces had become hollow, when that shaft of the spear, if you will, had rusted. President Reagan dealt with it decisively. He proposed two double-digit increases in the national defense, which the Congress sustained him on. And it was that action which was a key factor in winning the Cold War because the rest of the world saw America's commitment, America's willingness, America's strength, America's confidence in the future and eventually decided that freedom and democracy was the future of the world because we were leading in that direction. We were willing to make the commitment necessary to walk that path. Let us do the same thing today. This is a bipartisan amendment. Senator Lieberman and I are offering it. I have been handed a note that Senator Graham wishes to be added as a cosponsor. I ask unanimous consent that he be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. TALENT. We can do this. Yes, we have to resolve the other problems in the budget that are causing the deficit, but defense is not that area. Defense has given at the office. Now it is time to tend to American security and American needs. For that reason, I offer the amendment. I hope the Senate will sustain it and support our men and women in uniform. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT. The Senator is correct.

Mr. TALENT. The function 920, as I understand, is essentially the overhead across the board from a number of different agencies. So it comes out of administrative overhead, travel, et cetera, and I believed that funding these essential programs for the military was more important than that. So I challenge the agencies to find that funding to support this amendment. It is similar to what has happened in the past. We had several amendments last year that took substantial amounts out of function 920 in order to increase programs.

Mr. TALENT. No. I am willing to ask all the agencies to sacrifice travel budgets and expenses in order to fund the national defense. I say again, this has happened in the past to support other important programs. The Coleman amendment last year, for example, increased CDBG funding by $2 billion with a function 920 offset. I am telling the Senator what he knows. The Senator is an expert on the budget. So we have gone into administrative overhead in the past, where necessary, to support important programs. I cannot think of anything more important than giving the President at least what he has asked for for national defense. This is a question of whether we will fund the national defense in time of war at the President's request, at least. Who has the floor, Mr. President?

Mr. TALENT. Again, I thank the Senator and admire very much the sincerity with which he confronts these budgetary problems. Perhaps in view of the Senator's question, it would be good for me to emphasize the point I made during the speech. There are certain functions of the Government which, if we do not perform at least at a minimal level, have the opposite effect that people want when they seek to reduce the deficit. This is one of them. These bills must be paid, and the longer we wait to pay them, the more they will cost. For me, it is deja vu all over again. I said this in the 1990s. We were successful as a Congress in the 1990s in the latter part of the decade in getting more money into the budget above what the Clinton administration requested, but we did not get enough in. So those bills which were not paid have accumulated, with compound interest, at very substantial amounts. It is true that an increase which is slightly above inflationary rates, which would have been adequate if we had done it in the 1990s, is not adequate anymore. And if we do not do something of the nature I am talking about now--not just with this budget but next year's budget as well--then the bill will grow and grow and grow, and 2 and 3 and 4 years from now, it will be even greater. My friend and the Senator from New Hampshire are going to have an even bigger problem to confront in trying to deal with the budget deficit. It is not an option to not sustain the national defense. To the extent America is perceived as weak, much less to the extent that America is weak, it promotes instability and conflict in the world. Apart from the threat to human freedom, I will say to those who are concerned about the budget, that is very bad for the deficit. That is really negative for the deficit. Let us sustain the national defense. I encourage the Senator to continue working with his friend and my friend from New Hampshire to solve these other structural problems in the deficit and would be happy to support some bipartisan resolution. Let us not take it out on defense. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. TALENT. Given the time available, I did not speak as long as I could on this subject, but the Senator is referring to what the Pentagon calls resetting the force. In other words, after a war, we pay through the supplementals for the equipment that is actually destroyed. But a lot of the equipment is not destroyed; it is either left there or it suffers what a business would call accelerated depreciation. It comes back, but it only has a few years of useful life. The Senator is correct, we have that bill to deal with, as well.

Mr. TALENT. I think I had half an hour. How much time remains?

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I will not take the whole 11 minutes. I will do the Senate that favor, anyway. First of all, the Senator is tremendously knowledgeable about the budget. I respect very much what he is saying. I am pleased he recognizes the importance of the underlying thrust of the amendment. My understanding is the function 920 line has about $11 billion in it, so what I am calling for is a reduction of about a quarter in our overhead expenses, travel expenses. That has been done in the past in order to fund important programs. We are in agreement that there is a shortfall in defense. Nothing is more important across the board right now than sustaining at least the President's request. I argue, and perhaps will argue further in this process, that we need to do a little more this year, but we should at least do this, and we can do this with a reduction in overhead that occurs all the time in the private sector. I think we should. Now, the Senator mentioned various efficiencies we can use to make the money go further. I have been a strong supporter of those on the Armed Services Committee. I think there are efficiencies we can gain in terms of leasing and other kinds of measures. I would not want to leave the floor this morning leaving the Senate with the impression that is going to be enough to meet the obligations we have before us for national defense and national security. Remember, we are talking about the security of our homes, our families, our jobs. Remember what the attack on 9/11 did to the economy. We just saw numbers about how revenues were off in the early part of the decade. Well, that was not unrelated to the fact we were attacked. I am not saying we would not have been attacked had we been stronger throughout the 1990s; I am saying that right now, we are too far out on a margin of risk. The further you go on that margin of risk, the greater instability, the greater the lack of confidence in the world, and that hurts our economy. I said substantially the same thing a couple years ago when we were debating the highway bill. I was arguing in favor of bonding for infrastructure investment. Investment in defense, like investment in infrastructure, is not an optional expenditure of the Government. We have, if you want to look at it this way, a deficit in the national defense. As bad as the budget deficit is, I would argue the deficit in the national defense is worse because that deficit imperils both the national security and the economic security of the United States. So we need to make some tough decisions. I agree with the Senator when he says that. We can at least take this decision now. This amendment is offered on a bipartisan basis. And this concern is bipartisan in the Armed Services Committee. When we had what we call our posture hearing, looking at the posture of defense, Senator Inhofe, Senator Dayton, Senator McCain, Senator Lieberman, and I all raised the issue of whether, going forward, we needed a structural increase in the national defense. We are not asking for that here. We are not asking for that this year. We want to do a study of this issue. We want to look at it in a searching and bipartisan way and then report back, I hope next year-- early next year--to the Senate on what we need to do. But right now, we need at least to give the President what he has asked. I would hope we could find a way to go a little further than that in this budget and give the President what he asked for in the fall of 2004, before the Office of Management and Budget got at the Defense projections. That is why I am offering the amendment. I very much appreciate the spirit in which the Senator has responded. I hope he can stretch a point and perhaps find a ``yes'' vote for this amendment, and then debate, in as bipartisan a fashion as possible, the other structural issues we are dealing with with the deficit. I thank the Senate again, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. TALENT. I am very grateful.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I am more than happy to yield back.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. TALENT. I have no objection to the Senator from Washington going ahead because she was here.