Patty Murray: “I rise to join with Senator Burns in fully endorsing this amendment to the Armed Services bill. Chairman Stevens…”

“I rise to join with Senator Burns in fully endorsing this amendment to the Armed Services bill. Chairman Stevens, Senator Byrd, Senator Inouye, Senator Burns and myself have cosponsored this amendment with the sole intention of providing essential quality of life programs and initiatives for our men and women in uniform. Increasingly over the last few years, military construction has been given the shorter end of the stick in terms of adequate funding. Congress has always stood by our services, and managed to increase funding where we thought an increase was necessary. Again, this year we face a similar situation, with the budget request at $1.4 billion less than what we appropriated last year. The Armed Services Committee significantly bridged this gap by authorizing an additional $500 million in much-needed military construction projects. But we would like to take it a step further and add $200 million for military construction quality of life projects. This would make the military construction budget $8.48 billion, still $700 million less than what was authorized and appropriated last year, but at least $700 million above the less than adequate budget request. The projects we have included in this $200 million request are all bonafide quality of life initiatives.”