Pat Harrigan

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 10159) to authorize the Secretary of the Army to convey to the State of North Carolina a certain parcel of real property located at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on which the State shall construct a veterans' State home, and for other purposes.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, what does it say about our priorities if North Carolina has the land to train our soldiers for war but not the space to care for them when they grow old? That is the problem H.R. 10159 helps solve, and it is why I am proud to cosponsor this bill.

North Carolina is home to more than 600,000 veterans, but today the 150-bed Fayetteville State Veterans Home is closed after serious structural problems forced every resident out. The building has closed. The need that it served has not changed.

Just a few miles away at Fort Bragg, there are approximately 20 acres that can give that new home a place to be built.

I know Fort Bragg well. I trained there as a Green Beret and deployed from there to Afghanistan. The men I served alongside are veterans now. So am I. The 20-year-old soldier eventually becomes the 70-year-old veteran. The country that needed him at 20 still has a responsibility to him at 70.

Fort Bragg has spent generations preparing Americans for service. Now, we have an opportunity to use a small part of it to care for them after that service is over.

Give North Carolina the land. Let us build the home, and let us take care of the people who spent their lives taking care of our country.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hudson).

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

Mr. Speaker, one of the benefits of sitting on the House Committee on Armed Services is that we have a lengthy legislative streak of enacting the National Defense Authorization Act. It is a bill that sets the policies for the national security of our Nation.

I will provide some assurance to the sponsoring Member that I will work diligently to have this provision incorporated into the conference discussions of the National Defense Authorization Act that I hope will be finalized this Congress.

In summary, this is a strong bipartisan bill that is worthy of being enacted. The Army supports this bill, and it is the minimum support that we can provide to support the veterans who have labored so hard for our Nation.

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

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of my amendment. This amendment does one thing: It bars the Department of War from buying, installing, or operating automated speed cameras on military installations and requires any that are already in place to be decommissioned within 180 days.

These systems are not about safety. They are about revenue. They hand out fines without context, without discretion, and without due process for our servicemembers. We just spent the last few years working hard through the NDAA to increase lower enlisted pay, only to seemingly try to take it away from them.

Make no mistake, this is not just a financial risk. It is a security risk. We have seen what happens when camera networks tied to critical infrastructure get compromised. Reporting this year revealed that foreign intelligence services spent years secretly accessing Tehran's traffic camera network to track the movements of Iran's top leadership ahead of a strike that killed its Supreme Leader. These network systems are an open door for our adversaries to exploit.

To be clear about what this amendment does not do, installation commanders still keep the full authority to enforce speed limits through military police, exactly as they do today. Force protection, access control, and criminal investigation cameras at our facility gates will remain untouched. This amendment targets one narrow thing: automated speed enforcement, and nothing else.

Our troops should not be a captive customer base for a ticketing vendor or a soft target for our adversaries. This amendment closes that door while preserving every legitimate tool that a commander needs to keep a base safe.

Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I appreciate my colleague from California's concern about overall base safety. I think if we step back and actually look at the big picture here, what we are talking about is simply a tax on our lower enlisted personnel.

We have military police to enforce safety standards that are already issued by the base commanders across every installation that we have. At the end of the day, we cannot deny that NIPRNet has been compromised by over 90 percent of our most serious and significant adversaries--the exact same net that these speed cameras would live on.

I think that is a significant concern for the safety and security of our installation personnel and the operations that are ongoing on our installations. For that reason, I encourage my colleagues to strongly support this amendment.

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

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition today to the Roy amendment. Section 518 is a limited, responsible pilot. It authorizes, but does not require, the Secretary of War to test a risk- informed approach to drug testing, using voice-based assessment to help target where physical testing is actually warranted. It does not replace it. It stays inside the existing Drug Demand Reduction Program, it comes with privacy protections, a report back to this committee within 1 year, and it sunsets automatically with no action after 3 years. This amendment would kill that pilot before the Department ever has the chance to evaluate it.

The Department of War spends roughly $120 million a year on drug testing and burns more than 4.6 million servicemember hours doing it, even though only a small fraction of tests ever come back positive. A risk-informed approach could return millions of those hours to training and mission execution and save the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year. This is not about weakening drug testing. The statute requires the pilot to preserve deterrence, readiness, and good order and discipline. It is about testing whether we can apply our standards more intelligently instead of spreading the same blunt process across a force that is overwhelmingly clean.

This is a readiness issue. It is a taxpayer issue, and it is a servicemember dignity issue all at once. The Roy amendment defends an expensive, outdated status quo over a cautious, measurable pilot that has built-in oversight. Congress should be encouraging this kind of disciplined modernization, not blocking it before the Department of War ever gets the data.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this amendment and preserve section 518.

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