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Adam Smith: I yield myself an additional 1 minute. He explained to me that we laid out a strategy in 2012 and said we do not have…

On the recordJuly 12, 2017
I yield myself an additional 1 minute. He explained to me that we laid out a strategy in 2012 and said we do not have the money to fund that strategy right now. So I asked him: Well, how short are you? How much more money do you need? He looked at me like he didn't understand what I was asking, so I sort of explained it. The short answer: he didn't know. How could he not know? I mean, if you can sit there confidently and say, ``My gosh, we don't have enough money; we are way crazy short of our 2012 strategy'' and you still can't say how short, then you don't have a strategy. We need a strategy to make sure this money is spent wisely. I will close with a compliment of the chairman for something that he has done. We should also not assume that simply spending more money at the Department of Defense is necessarily going to make us safer. We have to make sure we spend it efficiently and effectively. I think this bill has a lot of very solid efforts to try to make us do that, towards acquisition reform, towards spending the money more wisely. It is not just a matter of spending more money. We have got to spend it smarter, and we have got to confront the lack of a strategy, and we have got to confront the fact that we still have not resolved our budget resolution problem. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.
Said by
Adam Smith
Democratic · Washington
Source
govinfo.gov
Jul 12, 2017

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