Waste of Taxpayer Money

Floor Speech

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Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I continue to be amazed and disappointed that the Republican Party wants to keep putting money in a black hole. The black hole is known as Afghanistan.

The story broke yesterday that the Pentagon spent $43 million on a single natural gas station in Afghanistan when it should have cost no more than $300,000. The Pentagon spent over $30 million in overhead costs to build this one gas station, and the gas station was set up to service a kind of car that a huge majority of Afghans cannot afford. The Pentagon also will not answer any questions about this ridiculous waste of money.

The $43 million gas station is one of the hundreds of examples of the waste of the taxpayers' money in Afghanistan. John Sopko has repeatedly written about the waste in Afghanistan. I don't know why Congress has continued to fund the waste and fraud in Afghanistan.

Instead, last week, Congress passed a budget deal that increased defense spending over the next 2 years by over $80 billion a year. I did not vote for this bill. We already have a national debt of over $18 trillion, and I cannot, in good conscience, vote to add $1.5 trillion to the debt.

The budget deal also puts $59 million into the Overseas Contingency Operation fund, which is a slush fund for spending money in unauthorized wars in the Middle East. I am for rebuilding our military, but I am not in favor of the waste in Afghanistan.

Mr. Speaker, enough is enough. President Obama signed us up for 9 more years in Afghanistan when he signed the bilateral security agreement last year. On Friday, he announced that he is putting American troops on the ground in Syria in an open-ended mission. This is a waste of money and a waste of lives. It needs to stop, and Congress has the power to stop it; but we will not use our constitutional authority to even debate what he is doing in the Middle East.

Mr. Speaker, I bring with me posters from time to time. I look at the deaths of so many men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who serve our Nation, and it breaks my heart.

So to make my point before I close, Mr. Speaker, we still have Americans dying in Afghanistan, but it doesn't make the papers anymore. We had a soldier from Fort Bragg--which is not in my district, but it is in North Carolina--who was killed in Iraq last week.

Mr. Speaker, I bring this poster today because it tells the story much better than my words could ever tell the story about war. It is a lady holding her little girl's hand. The little girl has her finger in her mouth, and she is wondering why her daddy is in a flag-draped coffin. I don't know what to tell that little girl. All I can tell that little girl is that Congress is indifferent to sending our young men and women to die in the Middle East.

It is time for Congress to meet its constitutional responsibility and have a debate and a vote on the floor of the House.

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