Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUSSELL. Mr. Chairman, the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental is a program that leverages brilliant engineers at places like the Silicon Valley or MIT to invent such amazing things as saline cooling to save the lives of badly wounded soldiers on the battlefield or create improved communications.

In just the last year, the DIUx program saved the United States Air Force hundreds of millions of dollars by replacing a whiteboard management system for managing refueling with an integrated app that saved millions of pounds of fuel each week, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars and, ultimately, billions of savings.

This never would have happened without DIUx. It pays for itself many times over. In fact, we would not have things today like Predator or key anti-missile defense systems without it.

Perhaps some big defense contractors might wish to cut DIUx, but only in Washington would we cut a program that integrates Silicon Valley and MIT engineers, develops products in months instead of decades, and saves billions of dollars. This amendment protects that from happening by restoring the $14 million in funding, something it already saved in fuel in just a couple of days with the United States Air Force.

I am proud to be a cosponsor of this bill, and I thank my colleagues for their work on this bipartisan measure. I urge support.

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