Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States Marine Corps faces significant readiness challenges and that budgetary uncertainty impedes the Corps' ability to meet ongoing and unexpected national security threats, putting United States national security at risk.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 995) expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Nation now faces a more complex and grave set of threats than at any time since the end of World War II, and that the lack of full, on-time funding related to defense activities puts servicemen and servicewomen at risk, harms national security, and aids the adversaries of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of my resolution, H. Res. 995, which expresses this House's commitment to providing the full, on-time funding our men and women in uniform need to defend our Nation.

This week and next, Mr. Speaker, we will be spending time on this floor discussing the devastating impacts nine

consecutive continuing resolutions have had on our military's readiness and on our ability to deter and defend against our adversaries. Despite the fact that this House has consistently, and normally in a bipartisan fashion, completed our work on time, we have repeatedly seen partisan politics, particularly in the Senate, prevent the Congress from delivering a funding bill to the President's desk on time. In fact, since Republicans took control of the House in 2011, the House has never failed to pass a Defense Appropriations bill on time.

Just a few weeks ago, we passed H.R. 6157, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2019, with an overwhelmingly bipartisan 359-49 vote.

Today's resolution, Mr. Speaker, expresses the sense of this House that failing to provide full, on-time, stable funding increases the risk to our servicemembers and aids our adversaries. The resolution expresses our commitment to ending the funding uncertainty our military faces and urges the Senate to similarly complete its work so we can provide the on-time funding our armed services require.

Mr. Speaker, we must stop forcing our men and women in uniform and their families to pay the price for our dysfunction.

Today, Mr. Speaker, we will consider three resolutions.

H. Res. 995, which I have introduced, acknowledges the unprecedented global threat environment we face and the negative impact these continuing resolutions have had on our military's ability to confront this environment and deter and, if necessary, defeat our enemies.

We will also consider H. Res. 994, offered by my colleague and fellow member of the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Gallagher from Wisconsin. Mr. Gallagher is a marine with two deployments to Al Anbar province in Iraq. His resolution details the negative impact of CRs and funding instability on the readiness of the U.S Marine Corps.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, we will consider H. Res. 998, offered by Mr. Wittman of Virginia, chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. Mr. Wittman's resolution lays out the damage that the CRs and unpredictable funding have done to the United States Navy.

Next week, Mr. Speaker, we will consider resolutions addressing the impact of unstable funding on the United States Air Force and the United States Army.

We know, Mr. Speaker, that not every Member of this body is on one of the defense-related committees, but we also know that every Member of this body is committed to the security of our Nation. I take the opportunity today, along with my colleagues, to lay out in detail the threats we face and the impacts our actions in this House can have on our military's ability to keep us safe.

Reflecting on the challenges facing our Armed Forces, Secretary Mattis put it this way: ``As hard as the last 16 years have been on our military, no enemy in the field has done more to harm the readiness of the U.S. military than the combined impact of the Budget Control Act's defense spending cuts, worsened by us operating 9 out of the last 10 years under continuing resolutions.''

Secretary Mattis went on to explain the consequences of Congress' failure to provide reliable, on-time, sufficient funding: ``Ships will not receive the required maintenance to put to sea; the ships already at sea will be extended outside of port; aircraft will remain on the ground, their pilots not at the sharpest edge; and eventually ammunition, training, and manpower will not be sufficient to deter war.'' Not sufficient to defer war, Mr. Speaker.

No experience, Mr. Speaker, has had a greater impact on me during my time as a Member of this body than having the Secretary of Defense testify in front of us as members of the Armed Services Committee and say that congressional abrogation of our constitutional duty to fund our military is putting our servicemembers at greater risk.

While our military has suffered under this burden of continuing resolutions and dangerous policies of our previous administration, our adversaries have been making steady gains. Never before in recent history have we seen the gap between our capabilities and those of our adversaries widen at such a breathtaking pace--and not in our favor, Mr. Speaker.

China is pursuing an aggressive strategy to overtake our military and economic advantage globally. They are developing technologies that are specifically targeted to diminish our ability to project our force. They are developing weapons systems against which we may not be able to defend.

They have utilized deficiencies in our current CFIUS process to attempt to acquire critical U.S. technology. Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE have made significant efforts to embed themselves in the United States, putting our telecommunications networks and, potentially, our defense supply chain at risk.

Militarily, economically, in cyberspace, in space, on land, in air, and at sea, the Chinese have made clear their objective is to achieve global preeminence, which means they must attempt to displace us.

The Russians continue to modernize their nuclear arsenal, as they violate their commitments to us under the INF Treaty. They, too, are developing advanced and threatening weapons systems and attempting to exercise their hegemonic ambitions across Europe. They have violated the borders and sovereignty of their neighbors. In the words of the National Defense Strategy, they are making efforts ``to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and use emerging technologies to discredit and subvert democratic processes in Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine.'' They have attempted to subvert our own democratic processes, as we saw in last week's indictment of 12 members of the GRU, Russian military intelligence.

We have seen in Russia and China a return to great power competition, and 8 years of Obama-era policies facilitated these developments. At the same time, we continue to face significant threats from rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea.

The Iranians benefited tremendously from the payments they received from the Obama administration, over $1.5 billion, when they entered into the Obama nuclear deal. This deal paved the way for a nuclear- armed Iran with no real verification provisions, no complete disclosure of their past activity, no cessation of their enrichment activity, and it lifted restrictions on their ballistic missile program.

President Trump was right to withdraw from this disastrous deal, but we are still living with the consequences of an emboldened Iran, enriched with U.S. taxpayer dollars and a pathway to a nuclear weapon. Their support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah has grown, while they continue to pose an existential threat to the State of Israel.

The North Koreans, similarly, continue to pose a serious threat, Mr. Speaker, with an arsenal of nuclear weapons, an ongoing ballistic missile program, and continued pursuit of biological and chemical weapons.

Despite recent success on the battlefield against ISIS, radical Islamic terrorism continues to pose a threat to our Nation. We have got troops deployed today, Mr. Speaker, around the globe in the fight against terrorism.

As we face all of these threats, we are also living through an era of increasingly rapid technological development. The very nature of warfare is changing. The ability and the agility required to successfully respond to these threats requires funding sufficiency and certainty.

Mr. Speaker, that certainty simply cannot be provided through continuous continuing resolutions. In the face of all these threats, Mr. Speaker, we in this body must resolve not to add to the risk our troops are facing. We must resolve to fulfill our constitutional duty and provide sufficient, on-time, reliable funding.

It took many years for the readiness, manpower, and training crises we face to develop. We in this House and in the Senate must be part of the solution today and for many days and years into the future.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, I would like to read something that the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, said before the House Armed

Services Committee last year in a hearing about the damage of continuing resolutions:

``I have a hard time believing,'' he said, ``that I am sitting before you now to discuss the potential that we might take steps to make our sailors' missions more difficult, to give our adversaries more advantage. . . . `'

Think about that, Mr. Speaker. That is what this debate is about. That is what this resolution is about. Insufficient, unreliable funding gives our adversaries an advantage. We must not be part of that any longer. We must resolve to get our work done on time, in the House and in the Senate, and to fulfill our constitutional obligation.

We must, in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, be worthy of the sacrifices our men and women in uniform make for us every day.

Mr. Speaker, I urge the adoption of this resolution, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and just want to say I enjoy very much the opportunity to serve with my colleague, Mr. Smith, on the Armed Services Committee, and I appreciate his support for this important resolution.

We disagree on several points. I know that Mr. Smith knows that the defense budget is not what is driving the debt in this country. I don't disagree that we need a fiscal policy and that we have got to address our fiscal concerns, but it is also the case that we have the votes, that we have the ability, as we have done in this House and as they could do in the Senate.

We saw, in the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Defense Appropriations bill passed out 30-1. So it is a bipartisan bill that we ought to pass. We passed it across this floor. We ought to pass it across the Senate floor. We ought to get it to the President's desk so that he can sign it, instead of being in a situation where we are holding it hostage to a whole range of other issues and concerns.

Mr. Smith and I do have big disagreements. You know, to talk about somehow that the tax cuts are impacting the Defense budget ignores the history of the fact that the Defense budget was being strangled when Barack Obama was in office. And as far as I know, nobody is accusing President Obama of cutting taxes too much.

So the challenge that our military is facing and the challenge of reliable sufficient funding isn't directly tied to tax policy. I think what we have got to do is decouple these things.

If we don't get the funding for the military right, as Mr. Smith said--you know, Secretary Mattis has said we can afford survival. Another way to say that is if we don't get this right, nothing else we do will matter. And the situation is so serious and so significant that if we let ourselves one more time go down the path of holding this funding hostage to other concerns and other issues, basically holding our men and women in uniform hostage, I would submit that we are not doing our job, and we are not fulfilling our constitutional obligation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Byrne), my colleague from the Rules Committee and from the Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Alabama.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, again, I appreciate very much my colleague's support for this important resolution. I look forward to having his support as we go forward on these resolutions that lay out very clearly how important it is to fund our men and women in uniform.

He and I have very serious and significant disagreements over tax policy. I believe--I know that the private sector is the engine of growth in this economy; that tax cuts, in fact, generate economic growth, and economic growth generates revenue; that if you really want to deal with the debt in this Nation, then you have got to generate additional revenue.

The way to do that is not by taxing people more. It is by letting people keep more of what they earn so they in fact can reinvest so we can see the kind of economic growth we need.

But I would say my colleague's focus on that issue today points out the problem that we have been facing. We face a number of critically important challenges in this body and in the United States Senate, but we have got to ensure that we don't hold our men and women in uniform hostage while we deal with those other issues.

We are, today, not at a time when we have got an international environment that is one in which we can feel safe in our predominance, in which we can feel safe in our ability to continue to project our power. We are in one where the threat to us is growing, and it is significant.

When you have got servicemen and -women, when you have got service chiefs, when you have got the Secretary of Defense telling us things like: our adversaries have weapons systems we might not be able to defend against, that policies and budget processes and votes that are undertaken in this body are increasing the risk to our men and women in uniform, those are things we have got to pay attention to. And I would say we have an obligation to pay attention to those things that is higher than any other obligation that we have.

We have to commit, Mr. Speaker, to fulfilling that constitutional obligation to providing full and on time funding for our troops.

And, Mr. Speaker, I would like to close today with something that General Dunford said in his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year. He said: ``The Joint Force must continue to receive sufficient, sustained, and predictable funding for the foreseeable future to restore our competitive advantage and ensure we never send our sons and daughters into a fair fight.''

Every single time we have to deploy our forces, Mr. Speaker, we must ensure that they have everything they need to prevail.

Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption of the resolution. I urge a continued focus on completing the Defense funding process on time and getting the bill to the President's desk.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, to begin with, the resolution that is presented before us is 100 percent accurate, and I completely agree with it.

We have had uncertain funding for going on almost 8 years now for the Department of Defense. It has been a series of continuing resolutions, two government shutdowns, multiple threatened government shutdowns, and an unbelievable amount of uncertainty. From one month to the next, the Pentagon does not know how much money they have to spend. That uncertainty, without a doubt, has undermined our ability to provide an adequate national security for this country.

So I agree with the maker of this motion that budget certainty would help enormously in terms of preparing our national security--well, preparing the men and women in our Armed Forces to face the threats that are in front of us. Beyond that, there was a lot said in the opening remarks there that I don't quite agree with.

Also, it is really important to sort of understand the context. Why are we in this situation? Why do we have budget uncertainty year after year?

I don't agree that it is simple incompetence or Congress just isn't feeling like doing its job. We have deep-seated differences of opinion about where to spend our money, and also, we have no fiscal policy as a country.

Well, that is not true, actually. Our fiscal policy is really rather clear. We want a balanced budget; we want tax cuts; and we don't want to cut spending.

Everything you need to know about why we have this problem can be contained in three votes that the United States House of Representatives took over the course of about a 4-month period. As I tell you about these three votes, I want you to know that 134 Republican Members of Congress voted for all three of these things.

Number one, a roughly $2 trillion tax cut. Number two, a budget deal that increased spending by $500 billion. Some of that was for defense; a lot of it wasn't. Then, in the ultimate irony, a week later, those 134 Members of Congress, Republican Members of Congress, voted for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. They want to cut taxes by $2 trillion; they want to increase spending by $500 billion; and they want a balanced budget.

And, oh, by the way, we are roughly $22 trillion in debt and running up a deficit that is projected to go up over $1 trillion going forward. That is not a responsible fiscal policy.

Now, I serve on the Armed Services Committee with all of my colleagues who are here today, and I hear the same things that Congresswoman Cheney hears about how our military is suffering under the uncertainty.

The readiness crisis is 100 percent real. It is getting better as we have gotten some funding the last couple years, but it is still a major challenge. But the reason for all of that is because of decisions that are made on the front end. You can't cut taxes by $2 trillion--after, by the way, over the course of the 15 years prior, we had already cut them by multiple trillion dollars--and then stand up and say DOD doesn't have enough money. You cut revenue and then complained that you don't have enough revenue. It doesn't really make sense.

The second point that I would make is it is not just the Department of Defense that is suffering under budget uncertainty. There are a whole bunch of different examples. I won't go into all of them, but the entire discretionary budget suffers under this uncertainty. And one big chunk of the discretionary budget is infrastructure, the bridges and roads and airports and a whole bunch of other things that basically enable our economy to function, which generates revenue and helps pay for things like national security.

Also, we have got bridges collapsing all over the country. There are, literally, United States citizens who have died as a result of our lack of investment in infrastructure.

So it is not just the Department of Defense. If we are going to address the uncertainty, if we are going to address the problems with dealing with our national security strategy, we have to address fiscal policy.

For going on 8 years now, we have been having this conversation in the Armed Services Committee, and most times my Republican colleagues sternly rebuke me for raising issues that are supposedly not directly related to the Armed Services, saying: We are the Armed Services Committee. We are not here to talk about the debt or the deficit or infrastructure or any of that other stuff.

Well, it all goes together, and what we as a congressional body have to do is come up with a plan that actually makes sense, that actually there is money for. If we do that, then we can have the stability for the Department of Defense.

Now, I will tell you, if we are $22 trillion in debt--and the deficit is projected to be pretty close to $1 trillion this year and quickly north of $1 trillion going forward--we are going to have to deal with that problem or there is not going to be as much money as we'd like for defense or infrastructure or education--or anything, for that matter.

So we have to address the fiscal irresponsibility of our budgeting process across the very long period of time, and certainly we can't keep cutting taxes.

Now, as far as what does that National Security Strategy look like, as was described, we face an incredibly complex threat environment. I agree with that.

I don't agree that getting rid of the Iran nuclear deal so that Iran can pursue nuclear weapons with absolutely no inhibition whatsoever is a step forward in the right direction, nor do I agree that sitting down with Kim Jong-un and agreeing, basically, to back off of a whole bunch of things and getting nothing in return--I know that, in the President's mind, North Korea is denuclearized, but they are not. They haven't taken a single, solitary step in that direction.

Lastly, the final point I want to make is the complex threat environment that we face is extraordinarily difficult. I will tell you one thing of which I am 100 percent confident. There is no way that, on our own, the United States of America can confront that threat environment.

We need allies. We need friends. We need countries that are willing to work with us to meet the national security threats that we face, which is why the trip that the President just took is so troubling. He spent the first part of it telling our allies, basically--sorry, I can't say that on the floor--just saying that he didn't need them, insulting them over and over and over again, allies that we are really going to need to meet the threats not just from Russia, but China, the terrorism threat that was described.

Our NATO allies are going to be crucially important to that, and the President, at one point, said he's not even sure why we are in NATO, insulted the EU and insulted all of our allies, and then turned right around and sided with Vladimir Putin against our intelligence communities, against our Justice Department, on the subject of Russian interference in our election.

So, in a complex threat environment, you don't want to make it easier for a country like Russia that threatens us and make it more difficult for countries ranging from Canada to Germany to Great Britain, who actually want to work with us, to meet that threat environment. So, on that point, we need more allies, and we certainly don't need to take the side of a dictator who

is threatening our country over our own intelligence agencies. That is not in the best interest of national security.

Overall, we have to have a fiscal policy. We can have the argument about the defense budget all we want, but if we keep cutting taxes and have no policy whatsoever to get our budget even close to under control, we are not going to have the money to spend on our national security needs or other things.

Now, I will close it out with this. General Mattis, Secretary Mattis, likes to say, ``We can afford survival.'' That is a nice phrase. Unfortunately, it is a little bit unclear on what it means because, what do you have to spend to survive? By and large, DOD doesn't engage in that sort of black-and-white way of looking at it: We spend this money, we survive; we don't spend this money, we die.

What they do, and what they've said over and over again, is they manage risk: If we don't spend the money here, that increases the risk by this amount.

I think that is a better way of looking at it. It is not a matter of whether or not we can afford survival, because we don't know exactly what China is going to do or Russia or any of these other folks are going to do or how we are going to manage it. It is a matter of managing risk.

It is very true that, if we continue to have an uncertain defense budget--heck, I would submit, if we continue to have an uncertain fiscal policy and an uncertain infrastructure budget, we are increasing the risk of our country's ability not so much to survive but to prosper and live in a peaceful world.

So this resolution is fine. It is horribly insufficient to actually give us the certainty and predictability in our budget that we need. To get there, we need to honestly address the fiscal challenges that our Nation faces and come up with a coherent fiscal policy that takes into account all the needs of our country in a balanced and coherent way so that we manage those risks in the best way possible and in the best interests of the American people.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume

Mr. Speaker, just a couple of quick points. The Department of Defense budget is 18 percent of the overall Federal budget, and you would be a pretty bad businessperson if you looked at your books and said that a thing that takes 18 percent of the budget has nothing do with the deficit. It all adds up piece by piece. It absolutely is a big part of what contributes to us having a deficit and a debt, so we cannot ignore what we spend on Defense and how it impacts everything else.

Now, you can make that policy decision that, you know, defense is just so much more important than infrastructure or healthcare or education or Social Security or Medicare or whatever, but to say that it doesn't impact the debt and the deficit is not, well, fiscally accurate.

And second, as far as tax cuts are concerned, yes, President Obama cut taxes repeatedly and by way, way too much and contributed to this problem. Most notably was in 2012 with the permanent extension of all of the Bush tax cuts. So, we did that, and then with the stimulus package back in 2009, there was about a $400 billion tax cut.

We have repeatedly, in this Congress--and I didn't vote for any of that. We have repeatedly in this Congress prioritized tax cuts over the men and women who serve in the military. That is what I find so ironic. We hear all these complaints about how we are underfunding the military, the complaints about readiness, and what the gentleman from Alabama said, when he talked about the impact that this is having on the men and women who serve, he is absolutely right. The continuing resolutions are devastating to the way we try to function within the Department of Defense.

I will again submit that they are also devastating to every other aspect of our discretionary budget, and that should not be ignored. But to cut taxes by trillions upon trillions of dollars and then look up and say, Gosh, how come we don't have enough revenue to fund our defense is hypocritical.

All I am asking is: Make a choice. If, in fact, we need to spend the amount of money on DOD that you are all saying we are, then let's raise the revenue and pay for it, okay. That is fine. That is a choice. But to both say, we are going to give away massive tax cuts primarily to the wealthiest people in this country, who, by the way, have been doing quite well for quite some time, and then come up and say, Gosh, it is just so irresponsible that we are not funding defense, that is not consistent and it is not a fiscal policy.

And, again, I will come back to the fact that this is all very well and good. I mean, what all these resolutions are saying is if we could just pass the Defense Appropriations bill, then everything would be fine. We have a $4 trillion plus budget. We have multiple layers of problems here. If we do not address the underlying fiscal issues that we are facing that I have described, then the men and women who serve in our military will face the brutal uncertainty that is very accurately described by my Republican colleagues over and over and over again.

We have to address the underlying issue, not just come out and make empty statements about how we want to support our men and women in the military after putting in place a budget and a tax policy that makes it next to impossible to do that. We have to deal with the issue up front so that we are in a position to actually provide what my colleagues have said we need to provide.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my good friend from Wyoming for yielding the time but, more importantly, for her leadership in this effort to highlight the devastating impacts when we fail to provide full, on-time, and robust funding to our military.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H. Res. 994, which would recognize the significant readiness challenges facing the United States Marine Corps, and warn that budgetary uncertainty is undermining the ability of our Marines to do their vital work day

in and day out in defense of this Nation.

Since fiscal year 2010, the Active-Duty Marine Corps has shrunk by 8 percent. Thanks to the work of this House, that figure is finally trending in the other direction, but there is still much more work to be done, all of which requires stable, robust, and on-time funding.

Seven years after the Budget Control Act we are still digging out from holes we dug ourselves. In hearing after hearing, we have heard military leaders make clear that they will face increased risk due to continuing resolutions and years of accumulated defense cuts.

It can be all too easy to wave off these warnings. After all, our military and Marine Corps, in particular, has a ``can-do spirit'' that is second to none. But increased risk isn't just an abstract notion. It can have very real consequences. The more than 60 Marines who have perished in marine aviation accidents since 2011 are a tragic reminder of what increased risk looks like in practice.

The new national security and national defense strategies marked sea changes in American security policy. With the new guidance that great power competition, and not terrorism, is the primary challenge to American national security policy. There is still much work to be done to ensure that the Marine Corps, along with the rest of the military, is best positioned to compete for the long-term.

From contested entry to dispersed operations from austere locations to contingency response, the Marine Corps is facing great challenges and opportunities. The obstacles are many as increasingly capable adversaries are forcing the Marine Corps to reconsider long-held assumptions about amphibious landings and its ability to operate close to shore.

In the face of these challenges, the Corps will have to do what it does best, innovate, and come up with new solutions to execute timeless missions. Ultimately, however, I am optimistic; not just because I was privileged to serve 7 years in the Marine Corps, and I know the quality of the men and women who continue to serve, but because of many other factors, including the simple geography of the Indo-Pacific, which is tailor-made for the United States Marine Corps.

As former adversaries learned on the islands of Guadalcanal, New Guinea, and Tarawa, the absolute last place on Earth you want to be is between a Marine and his objective.

In the long run however, the only thing that can stop the Marine Corps is this body's failure to do its job. If we fail to provide on- time, adequate, or predictable funding, we will undermine our Marine Corps' ability to get the job done.

This resolution takes a small step to recognize these challenges and commit to doing better. We owe our beloved Marine Corps nothing less.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I quite agree with the sentiment expressed by my colleague, Mr. Smith, that we do need to look at the overall budget picture. I think what has changed in that picture over time has been the amount of the budget consumed by mandatory spending, which is a very difficult problem. I concede that it is going to require men and women of good faith on both sides of the aisle to come together and have, if nothing else, an honest debate.

The argument was also made that we spend more on defense than a large number of our competitors and our allies, combined, in many cases. I hear that a lot. That is true. It is also not that helpful of a statistic, as it ignores both the size of our economy, the relative size of our economy, as well as the unique nature of our global commitments.

A more useful matrix of perhaps what we are spending as a percentage of GDP, we are still spending below the post-World War II average on defense as a percentage of GDP. For example, during the 1950s, 8 years of peace and prosperity, we were spending closer to 10 percent of our GDP on defense.

So I just think we need to be careful when we throw around different terms like this. And I welcome that debate. It is one we definitely need to have.

I just would close by saying our Marines put their lives on the line on a daily basis. When we go to war, we cannot guarantee that everyone will come home safely, and the Marines know that. They gladly put their lives on the line. They take the risk, and they ride to the sound of the guns regardless.

But I do think that we need to look at what we have the power to affect, and what we have the power to affect

here as Members of Congress, regardless, actually, of who is in the White House, what we have the obligation to affect is to guarantee that we will never send our servicemembers into an unfair fight, that we will provide them with the training, the equipment, and the numbers they need to run up the score on the enemy with decisive and overwhelming force.

Mr. Speaker, that is what this resolution is about, and I urge my colleagues to support its adoption.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Res. 995.

As many of us have stood on this floor and said, We have planes that can't fly, ships that can't sail, and troops that can't deploy.

Under the Obama administration, we saw an alarming trend where we allowed our Armed Forces to be hollowed out, and we allowed a critical readiness crisis to develop.

Over the last 2 years, members of the House Armed Services Committee and others have fought tirelessly to ensure our military gets the level of funding they need, not only to fix our current readiness crisis but also to build up our force to a size to match the current threat environment, which is the most complex one we have faced since World War II.

While I am proud of the work we have done so far to raise the top line Defense number, there is another critical piece to the puzzle. Continuing resolutions are just as detrimental to our national security as the Budget Control Act caps. Every day we don't pass the Defense Appropriations bill, we are denying resources to our servicemembers and making it harder for them to do their job.

Continuing resolutions and budgetary uncertainty also end up costing the taxpayers more money. The Secretary of the Navy has said that the Department of Navy alone wasted $4 billion since 2011 because of continuing resolutions. That is $4 billion of real money that could have been used to fund more ships, more planes, or more maintenance.

Under a continuing resolution, the Department of Defense and the services are not allowed to enter into any new contracts. Every year we have delayed the timelines of scheduled maintenance availabilities and procurement schedules. All of these things are crucial to maintain deployment rotation and ensure the U.S. presence is felt around the world.

Compare this to your personal finances. For half the year you are able only to pay your current expenses, like car payments and utilities. You know you will get money later in the year for new things you want to buy or invest in; however, you don't know how much you will get or whether you will get it. Does that sound frustrating and ineffective?

We have the world's greatest military. Yet, we are hamstringing them with an irresponsible funding cycle. Let me put this in very blunt terms. The inability of Congress to pass government funding bills on time has endangered the health, safety, and lives of our servicemembers. Just look at the aviation accidents and recent collisions of Navy ships. These incidents can be blamed, at least in part, on the readiness crisis.

As Members of Congress, we have a responsibility here. We are not the ones on the front lines and deployed around the world, but we play an integral role: getting those servicemembers their funding on time.

In a time where we face great power competition with Russia and China, radical Islamic extremism in the Middle East, and Iran and North Korea, there is no shortage of national security priorities.

Here, in the House, we have passed our Defense funding bill on time yet again, but we need our colleagues in the Senate to follow suit. I know it is a priority for my Alabama colleague, Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, to get our military funded, so I hope we can do our job responsibly and on time.

Mr. Speaker, let's not let petty political games get in the way of funding our Nation's military, protecting our servicemembers, and ensuring the safety and security of the American people. Let's pass this resolution and demonstrate our strong commitment to passing a Defense funding bill before the end of the fiscal year.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 994) expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States Marine Corps faces significant readiness challenges and that budgetary uncertainty impedes the Corps' ability to meet ongoing and unexpected national security threats, putting United States national security at risk.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Gallagher), my colleague on the Armed Services Committee, to discuss his resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking both my colleagues, Mr. Wittman from Virginia, Mr. Gallagher from Wisconsin, and all of the folks on the Armed Services Committee, Chairman Thornberry, Ranking Member Smith, as well as the folks on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, led by Chairwoman Kay Granger, for their tremendous work on these crucially important issues.

I think that, again, Mr. Smith has highlighted, really, the crux of this issue, and the crux of this issue is whether or not we as a body are going to recognize that we have the ability here and what we do here will determine whether or not we provide the support and the resources our troops need or whether we increase the risk they face.

When we are facing a situation where we have had more servicemembers die in training accidents than in combat in the last year, that is an unacceptable and indefensible situation.

Mr. Speaker, on this particular resolution, I want to thank my colleague from Wisconsin for introducing this resolution. As a marine, he understands better than most how what we do in this body impacts our men and women in uniform.

H. Res. 994 highlights the vast readiness impacts we have seen in the Marine Corps over the past 9 years of continuing resolutions, sequestration, and overall budget dysfunction. We do not want to be in a position, Mr. Speaker, where the Marines are forced to continue to use aging or outdated equipment, or they don't have the funds necessary to receive the training they require to undo this readiness crisis, or they don't have the flexibility they need to respond to the fact that we have got an absolutely changing world of warfare. They need agility to do that, and that requires funds from this body.

As my colleagues have said, we have made great progress. Over the past year, we have increased the defense spending caps for fiscal year 2018 and 2019, and we have agreed to fund the Department of Defense at $700 billion for fiscal year 2018.

Mr. Speaker, we have got to get that done now for fiscal year 2019. The readiness crisis was not created in a single year, and it will take many years of effort to be able to address it.

The bill that we considered in the House just a few weeks ago passed with over 300 bipartisan votes. I would hope, Mr. Speaker, that we can now, today, commit all of ourselves as a body and urge our colleagues on the other side of this building to ensure that the work that we do is worthy of the men and women in uniform who protect all of us, to ensure that we stay on track to get this bill passed by the Senate and to the President's desk before the end of the fiscal year.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Gallagher) to close.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.