Mike Levin: “first I thank and commend the Senator from Iowa for this amendment. It is an amendment which raises a lot of very…”

“first I thank and commend the Senator from Iowa for this amendment. It is an amendment which raises a lot of very significant issues about the Department of Defense inventory. It is a subject I had quite a bit to do with many years ago, particularly when we raised issues about the amount of the warehousing that exists in the Department of Defense, the amount of purchases which were made which contributed to that inventory, which was excessive. We made some progress. This was a number of years ago, but nonetheless we made some progress. I think we actually reduced the number of warehouses at that time by about 40 percent. But it is obvious we still have a problem and we are going to have a greater problem if we do not address it because of the increased size of the Defense budget and the purchases of the Defense Department. The GAO has issued a report. It is a fairly new report. Frankly, we have not had a chance to even analyze that report.”