Rob Portman: “So GAO has looked at this. They have said there will be $1.86 billion in surplus in these fluctuation accounts at the…”

“So GAO has looked at this. They have said there will be $1.86 billion in surplus in these fluctuation accounts at the end of fiscal year 2016. They have actually updated their figures now with even more recent data, and they have just adjusted the 2016 surplus even higher to $2.02 billion. No one has produced a currency projection to counter this GAO estimate. So we are talking about over $2 billion in this account that is available. By the way, the money we are talking about here is not going to be taken and used for other readiness priorities because the SASC bill has already swept up that money for readiness. This money will be sitting in a reserve fund. The Pentagon does not need to be sitting on this size of a reserve fund--essentially a slush fund--when we do have these needs that have been identified. The Army has made a formal request for these. They have asked for assistance here. These deployed units need this assistance. They said they need it. We ought to put this to good use--namely, for an urgent requirement like this one. Again, if you look at the House bill versus the Senate bill, the House has used more of this funding in this reserve fund, this slush fund, than we have used even when you include this additional requirement I am talking about today. So this notion that somehow we cannot do this because the offset is not good--it just does not make any sense. It does not fit with what GAO has said, and it does not fit with what the House has done.…”