Marshall Sanford: “I rise as a conservative in support of this measure. As conservatives, we want less government; but the government that…”

“I rise as a conservative in support of this measure. As conservatives, we want less government; but the government that we have, we want to work better. I think that WRDA does that. I think one of the things we look at is how do we become more competitive as a society relative to all the other places around the globe in the way that we deliver goods, whether by land, by air, or by sea. Again, this bill does that. I stand in support of this measure and thank the chairman for his work on it. I want to particularly single him out for what he has done with the WRDA process. As has already been mentioned, there was a 7-year skip between WRDA bills. But there was a bill in 2014; there was a bill in 2016; there was a bill in 2018. That kind of predictability is absolutely necessary if you are going to see marine and other investments as we have seen, for instance, in a place like Charleston. Two, I want to thank him for what he is doing with regard to non- Federal sponsors. This idea of adding new flexibility in the way that we originate programs, I think, makes a lot of sense. One authorization means a bottleneck. What this bill does is frees up bottlenecks in the way that things get funded. Third, I want to single out Garret Graves and, again, the chairman, for this study on whether or not civil works can be done by nonmilitary actors. I think that this is vital in moving the backlog through that now exists on the WRDA front.…”