Political Quotes

“I thank Ranking Member Smith for his leadership. Also I want to thank Chair Rogers who has conducted the committee with bipartisanship. I got to travel with him, and he is fun to travel with. My opposition here is not with disrespect to either the chairman or the ranking member. As people know, I have been concerned about the Pentagon budget getting almost to $1 trillion, and I am concerned about the five primes and the amount of cost overruns they have had; when you look at the F-35s and Lockheed, a contract that has been delayed, that has almost $200 billion in cost overruns; when you look at the IG report about Boeing getting $150,000 for soap dispensers; when you look at the reports about electric breast pumps being charged to our military for $1,400 when in other places you can get it for $200. There is a lot of waste in this budget, and my hope is, actually, with the committee that we will engage with Elon Musk and engage with DOGE on this issue to have a Pentagon budget that is going to be more modernized, where the American people will get their value of their tax dollars, where we can have more competition for the five primes and have a strong national security with a lower budget. I hope we can do that in a bipartisan way. My hope is that Musk, what he did with SpaceX in disrupting Lockheed and Boeing, with the ULA maybe finds areas that we can disrupt other five primes.…”