On the recordDecember 7, 2010
The more I learn about the Department of Defense's procurement policies and the procurement policies of other agencies, the more angry I get, the more angry this Congress should get, and the more angry the American citizenry should get. In my home State of Connecticut, we pioneered America's shipbuilding and aerospace industries. However, today, as more and more of U.S. taxpayer dollars go overseas to buy equipment and parts and machinery for the U.S. military, those shops, once bustling with workers, are now silent. We have example after example of how our procurement policy has gone wrong. You have the big-ticket, high-profile examples, like the Air Force KC-x Tanker which went to Airbus rather than to an American-based bid. You have the 21 helicopters that we are supplying to the Afghan military today that we are buying--not from an American manufacturer but from a Russian manufacturer. And then you have the thousands and thousands of smaller examples on seemingly a daily basis in which American companies come up short. When we buy Chinese-made doorknobs for the renovations at Camp Pendleton when there is an American company that can do the same work, when we buy our copper and nickel tubing for our subs from a German manufacturer, when there is an American firm that can do the same work, we are wasting billions and billions of American dollars sending our jobs overseas.
