[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 98 (Monday, June 23, 2014)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1048]
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2015
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speech of
HON. RUSH HOLT
of new jersey
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
The House in Committee of the Whole House on the state of
the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 4870) making
appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal
year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes:
Mr. HOLT. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to this bill.
Let me begin by acknowledging the enormous work that went into
bringing a bill of this scope to the floor. It contains a number of
provisions I support, including a 1.8% pay increase for our troops and
other measures designed to improve the lives of our servicemembers and
their families. I am particularly grateful for the committee's
inclusion of nearly $40 million above the President's request for
suicide prevention and outreach activities, and twice what I and 100 of
my House colleagues had requested earlier this year. I am also grateful
for the committee's acceptance of an amendment I offered that mandates
a study on the potential relationship between financial stress and
suicide among members of the military. In March 2014, we suffered no
combat deaths but lost 700 servicemembers and veterans to suicide. We
have to end this epidemic, and I hope these additional investments and
this study will help bring about that outcome.
Moreover, this bill now contains important reforms to our nation's
surveillance practices. Three amendments that I either offered or co-
sponsored were attached to this bill, and they are worth discussing in
some detail.
My first amendment would set aside $2 million to expand the
Intelligence Community Whistleblowing and Source Protection
Directorate, which provides employees of the National Security Agency
(NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other intelligence
agencies with a safe, legal, and secure way to report abusive or
unlawful practices. The amendment passed unanimously.
Currently, this office is literally a one-man operation. Given the
fact that there are tens of thousands of federal employees and
contractors who work for Intelligence Community elements, it is simply
not realistic to expect one person to be able effectively to receive
and investigate large numbers of valid complaints from conscientious
internal whistleblowers through, no matter how talented. Because of the
secrecy of the intelligence community, oversight is impossible without
the participation of employees inside the system who know about
activities of the agencies. This amendment will help ensure that all
employees and contractors in the IC know where and how they should
lawfully report potential incidents of waste, fraud, abuse, criminal
conduct or whistleblower retaliation.
The second amendment, offered with Rep. Alan Grayson (FL-09), would
prohibit funds from being used to subvert or interfere with the
integrity of a cryptographic standard proposed, developed, or adopted
by National Institute of Standards and Technology. Last year, published
reports indicated that NSA had slipped language into an encryption
standard published by the National Institute of Standards and
Technology that created a ``back door'' that NSA--as well as foreign
intelligence services or malicious hackers--could exploit. The Holt/
Grayson amendment would prohibit that practice and passed unanimously.
The last thing the NSA should be doing is weakening encryption
standards. This amendment is one of many steps we need to take to
prohibit such conduct in the future.
The third amendment, offered by me and Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner, Jr.
(WI-05), Zoe Lofgren (CA-19), Thomas Massie (KY-04), John Conyers, Jr.
(MI-13), Ted Poe (TX-02), Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02), Jim Jordan (OH-04),
Beto O'Rourke (TX-16), Justin Amash (MI-03), Jerrold Nadler (NY-10),
Tom Petri (WI-6), Suzan DelBene (WA-01), Blake Farenthold (TX-27), G.
K. Butterfield (NC-01), and Mark Sanford (SC-01) would end two abusive
surveillance practices revealed in recent months.
First, the amendment would prohibit any warrantless search of the so-
called ``702 databases''--the massive government databases, created by
the NSA and first disclosed by Edward Snowden, that contain records of
the emails and phone calls of millions of innocent U.S. citizens.
One of the predictions I and others made in 2008 when Section 702 of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act became law was
that NSA would misuse the law for the ``reverse targeting'' of
Americans' communications while collecting against foreigners. As we
now know, that is exactly what happened, and those communications--
billions of phone calls, emails, text messages and the like--sit on
National Security Agency servers, available for search without a
warrant. This amendment would bar the NSA from using any funds in this
act to conduct any warrantless search of stored communications of
Americans collected under Sec. 702 of FISA, thus protecting the privacy
and Constitutional rights of all Americans.
Second, the amendment would prohibit the NSA and Central Intelligence
Agency CIA from installing ``backdoors''--such as malicious software or
hardware--into commercially produced products. This provision was
originally contained in my Surveillance State Repeal Act, H.R. 2818.
Despite efforts by the House leadership to derail the amendment, it
passed by a large bipartisan majority of 293-123.
This amendment makes a loud and clear point: It's time to stop
treating Americans as suspects first and citizens second.
Unfortunately, despite the many good and important things contained
in H.R. 4870, this bill continues to make the wrong choices for the
wrong reasons. The overall spending would be almost $600 billion, a
level that is impossible to justify in terms of the threats to the U.S.
or in terms of spending by other countries, including potential
adversaries. This bill would spend another $10 billion on a failed
missile defense system that has not been, and will not be, ever be
viable. The so-called ``overseas contingency operations'' fund--the
money that fuels the war in Afghanistan and our combat activities
elsewhere in the world--is set at nearly $80 billion dollars, and a
large slice of that money will be used to continue an American military
presence into 2015 and possibly beyond. It includes hundreds of
millions of dollars for research on a new nuclear bomber design. And
taking the prize for defense-related corporate welfare is the
beleaguered F-35 program. Congressional Quarterly reports that the full
cost of the program may exceed $1.5 trillion dollars over its lifetime.
That is more than we will spend on the entire federal government in the
coming year. There are vastly cheaper alternatives that would still
provide the United States with a first-rate modern fighter-bomber.
Instead, this bill throws still more good money after bad.
I am not comfortable with vast sums of money this bill will waste on
weapons we don't need and wars we should not be fighting. But I am also
not comfortable allowing the National Security Agency to continue
collecting and exploiting the communications of tens of millions of
innocent Americans. Accordingly, it is with mixed feelings I oppose
passage of this bill and I urge my colleagues to do likewise.
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