Bruce F. Vento: “the Republican led Appropriations Committee has once again produced a substantially increased military spending bill…”

“the Republican led Appropriations Committee has once again produced a substantially increased military spending bill that reneges on the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997. When all the accounting schemes are pushed aside, we find that it spends $4.4 billion more for fiscal year 1999 then called for under the carefully crafted budget outlay cap enacted by Congress less than a year ago. This bill illustrates that the House Republican Leadership has chosen to ignore the professional judgement of the CBO on how to account for the spending in this bill. The result is to simply not count billions in military spending that the CBO determined should be counted. I will remind my Colleagues that just two-and-a-half years ago this same Republican leadership went so far as to shut down the government over its insistence that the President and the Congress use no other spending blueprints than those made by the CBO. Furthermore, this bill is filled with projects selected more based on the district in which the money will be spent, rather than how the product will be used by our fighting forces. One pet project is $432 million added in this bill for seven C-130J aircraft that were not even requested by the Pentagon. This continues past practices of adding substantial sums for these planes that are built in Georgia. The unit cost of the C-130J is an alarming $60 million per plane.”