Political Quotes

“This amendment would simply eliminate funding for the Mission Force Enhancement Transfer Fund, which amounts to more than $348 million. The fund was created in this bill in order to ensure that additional funding remain available for the Secretary of Defense to transfer, if he needed to, to other accounts to ``mitigate unfunded requirements'' according to the committee report. The report also contains a list of seven priorities that the Secretary can transfer these funds in support of. I am not sure about this concept myself, particularly in this budget climate, of providing the Pentagon an authorization that essentially amounts to a blank check for a couple of hundred million dollars. It's my understanding that the committee identified $1 billion in savings in the underlying bill and created the fund using these savings. It's also my understanding, however, that during the full committee markup more than $650 million of that money was moved out of this fund by members of the committee seeking to increase funding for their own priorities in the bill. {time} 2220 I understand that Members want to retain the ability to move money around to areas they feel are underfunded and that should receive additional funding. However, if the committee was able to identify $1 billion in savings, I think it ought to put that savings toward decreasing the underlying, or, I am sorry, the cost of the underlying bill.…”