Lloyd Bentsen: “I hate to have to oppose an amendment by my good friend, the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Roemer], but the fact is that…”

“I hate to have to oppose an amendment by my good friend, the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Roemer], but the fact is that we have invested about $18 billion in a program which from my viewpoint appears to work. It would be one thing if we were investing funds year in and year out and showing no results to walk away from the program, but that is not what is going on here. We are looking at a program where we are building up, where it is going to work, and it would be a grave mistake and really a bad business decision for us to walk away at this point, to break the contracts, to say that we are not going to go forward. And if we do not do it with this, as the gentleman from California [Mr. Brown] says, if we do not build the station, we will stop at this point and we will lose ground. I think it would be a very serious mistake. Yes, we have spent the vast majority of the money, and we made progress. Yes, two-thirds of the hardware has been developed.”