Political Quotes

“I just wanted to follow up on a point that Leader Pelosi just made regarding the OCO account, the Overseas Contingency Operations account, which, at Armed Services, we are dealing with actually right now. The President came over with his OCO request for this year of $80 billion. This funds the troops over in Afghanistan, the 34,000 that are still fighting courageously to defend our country. At the end of this year, the projection is that that troop level will be brought down to, at the highest level of 10,000, possibly even lower, and combat missions, for all intents and purposes, are going to come to an end. As the Congressional Budget Office has demonstrated over and over again, they will score savings with the OCO drawdown that is going to happen at the end of this year. Indeed, the Ryan budget has used those OCO savings to help balance its own priorities, so this is not funny money. This is not hypothetical. Anyone who has been on a CODEL over to Afghanistan knows we are spending money over there, and starting next year, we are going to spend a lot less money because of the change in our deployments over in Afghanistan. The cost of the permanent fix to SGR is $135 billion over the next 10 years. You only need a portion of the OCO account to permanently fix SGR, and everybody who has even come close to discussing this issue knows that in this building.…”