John Garamendi

The Federal money that supports the educational system, the career education training programs, require that those programs reach out to the employers in the area.

The major contractors are basically moving out of legacy and moving on to tomorrow's systems, leaving behind problems for you all to solve.

We want happy talk to be executed, or executed to be happy talk, either way.

Part of the problem that this committee has, at least this chairman has, is that there are multiple definitions of the way in which the money flows.

The Marine Corps and the Air Force are receiving substantial new funds to the emergency appropriations for the rebuilding of some of your facilities.

Gentlemen, you should be able by now to understand where we are going here with this committee. We are going to hold you accountable to the plan.

We will look at the budget and see if you are actually going to start.

For all of you, you should be getting the gist of where I am going. Happy talk. I want real commitment, meaning, are you going to put the money and the effort into carrying out the plan?

The Department of Defense organic industrial base, comprised of depots, arsenals, and shipyards, is a critical part of our national security apparatus.

I would recommend that we build into it incentives and specificity that this be taken into account.

We need to provide the kind of flexibility and new mandates for the Army Corps of Engineers and local flood control agencies to adjust to the realities of climate change and more flooding.

Let's see, super floods, super hurricanes, atmospheric rivers, climate change. This is the reality of today and even more so in the future.

So if we take the after event with Public Law 84-99, could we, should we apply that before the event?

We worked with this Committee and these members because OMSA understood that if changes to the Jones Act are necessary, Congress should enact them.

Thus far this program has not worked well. Made progress, no doubt about it. But we got some very, very serious problems that have to be resolved.

I don't see a multiyear contract going forward until the fundamental questions that have been asked thus far and several that have not yet been put on the table are resolved.

This is an issue that has--that requires our attention. We are talking $1.4 trillion over the next 25 years or so--an extraordinary amount of money that is really going to be controlled by two companies, both of whom are at this table.

I thank you, Mr. Norcross. That is the fundamental point we have been raising throughout this entire hearing.

The answer is no, we cannot wait unless we want a bunch of airplanes sitting, unable to fly.

A lot of this is blowing in the wind to today. We will see what comes of all of it with the meeting that is taking place as well as the congressional point of view, which may differ from what the White House point of view is at the end of…

I want to thank you and your colleagues at the GAO for its work--your work--over almost two decades now on this program.

I would posit the reality that you are pushing profits over quality and safety.

You are driving profit, you are not driving quality, and you sure as heck are not driving safety.

Then what is the company's standard for quality over profit?

You have a systemic problem in your company. You are reaching for profit, which, incidentally, was very, very significant in 2018.