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 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 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.