Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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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