Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise to offer a bipartisan amendment with Mr. Cohen of Tennessee, Ms. Esty of Connecticut, and Mr. Rigell of Virginia that will go a long ways to ensure American tax dollars in Afghanistan are spent in a wise and realistic fashion. My amendment would specifically reduce funding of the Afghanistan Infrastructure Fund by $79 million to a total of $200 million, the level adopted by this House during last year's Defense appropriations bill. The savings would then be sent to the spending reduction account. We have already spent billions of dollars toward rebuilding the infrastructure of Afghanistan, and Congress has appropriated over $1 billion alone to the Afghanistan Infrastructure Fund since it was created in 2011. As of March 31 of this year, SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, reported that only $102.9 million of the $1 billion that Congress has appropriated has actually been dispersed for projects. Perhaps even more significant, SIGAR has found that the projects which are under way are behind schedule and years away from completion and raise serious concerns about whether some of the projects may run counter to our goals and the COIN strategy, either because they have created expectation gaps among the Afghan people or that they lack local citizen support. This year, $279 million has been requested for two new infrastructure projects.…”