Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from Texas. I have worked on these areas for a long time. I too am a defense hawk. I am not often accused of that because I am critical of wasteful spending in the Pentagon. Let me outline for my colleagues that the Pentagon's budget is near $600 billion, counting the extra money for overseas efforts today. Just by auditing the Pentagon, the GAO estimates the Pentagon itself would save $25 billion. The only branch of the Pentagon that has come close to an audit so far is the Marine Corps. For every dollar they are spending now on managing, they are saving $3 in the Marine Corps. So we have repeated attempts through the year to address the symptoms of the problems rather than the real problem. Let me outline that. The Pentagon has a broken procurement system. If we think about the programs which have been canceled and the penalties paid because of the programs which have been canceled--and Senator McCain can talk about those better than I ever could--we have never fixed the real problem, and the real problem is what Eisenhower warned against. It is the defense industrial complex. The only way we will ever solve the procurement problem of major weapons systems is to force the defense industry to have capital at risk on new weapons systems. In other words, they have to have money in the game. What routinely happens are two things: One is they don't have money in the game and we start out at cost-plus programming.…”