Jim Inhofe: “we had a situation in which we went through an 8-year period of time when our military was somewhat devastated, and I…”

“we had a situation in which we went through an 8-year period of time when our military was somewhat devastated, and I want to share some of the specifics of that because it is a serious thing. We are going to be voting on the defense budget agreement, and I have already stated where I stand on it. I am here to outline why the budget agreement is necessary for our national defense. This defense budget agreement will be able to focus on the Senate's Armed Services' top priorities, one of which is to fix the on-base privatization of military housing. Remember that this happened about 6 months ago. We discovered, all of a sudden, that we were not doing a good job on our privatized housing. Hey, I have to admit that I am partly responsible for that because I was around here when we decided to privatize the housing. It did work for a while. I think, after a period of time, people got a little careless, and there was a little slack. Some of the contractors who made that commitment got a little bit greedy. This information as to how bad the conditions were came from a person at Tinker Air Force Base who was the spouse of a military person. When I first heard this, I thought there were bad conditions just in my State of Oklahoma, but there were not; they were all over the Nation. So we fixed that thing. We fixed it with our defense authorization bill, and we had a lot of provisions in there.…”