Timothy Roemer: “The bill can be described as a blank check policy. It can be described as saying putting the contract and everything…”

“The bill can be described as a blank check policy. It can be described as saying putting the contract and everything else before the horse and saying we are not sure how much this is going to cost, it might be $5 billion, it might be $8 billion, it might be $15 billion or $20 billion, but we shall deploy this system at the earliest possible date. You might even guess from the debate so far that we are not spending a dime on this system, and I would remind everybody in the Chamber that we are currently spending $2.9 billion each year, already, on these systems. So we are spending money on pursuing these different systems and giving a blank check to go forward with a system that is unproven, extremely costly and untested. Now what the Spratt amendment simply does is it says we are not going to give you a blank check, we are going to have some checks and balances to this system.”