National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020--Motion to
Floor Speech
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Mr. CARPER. Madam President, this Saturday is June 22. It is not just any June 22. It marks 75 years to the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law one of the most significant pieces of legislation in our Nation's history. It was called, and is called, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. We know it today as the GI bill.
Since 1944, the GI bill has helped literally millions of not just servicemen but a lot of servicewomen. When you look at our Armed Forces today, there are a lot of servicewomen who serve in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and in the Coast Guard. I remember being a midshipman at the Ohio State Navy ROTC in the 1960s, and we had no women in our unit. There were no women in any ROTC unit in colleges across the country, as far as I know. There were no women who were nominated to attend armed service academies--the Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, Merchant Marine Academy. None of them had women. I got to my squadron on the west coast during the Vietnam war, and we had about 300 men in my squadron. About 10 percent were officers. The others were enlisted men. We had no women in my squadron.
All that has changed. When you go to any college that has a ROTC unit today, they are allowing women in. In the academies, you find women. In my old squadron, we find women. They are not just E-1s, E-2s, and E-3s; they are O-4s, O-5s, O-6s, and they are doing a great job. The GI bill is for them too.
Since 1944, the GI bill has helped millions of World War II veterans purchase a home, pay for a higher education or obtain job training and, in turn, transformed our Nation's economy.
Our Presiding Officer, who has served our country in uniform, knows of what I speak. I was just off of Active Duty at the end of the Vietnam war and in Delaware when I finished up my MBA, which is financed in part by the GI bill. I had scraped enough money together to buy a house. I think it cost about $35,000. I didn't have $35,000, but with the help of the GI bill, I was able to get a mortgage and buy my first home, all those years ago.
In the years since World War II, the GI bill has continued to change the lives of millions of veterans by spurring economic opportunity and helping to create the middle class as we know it today. That is why earlier this week I was proud to reintroduce a bipartisan resolution in the Senate, alongside my colleagues Senators Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Jon Tester of Montana. They are the chair and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, which designates this week as National GI Bill Commemoration Week, celebrating the historical significance of the GI bill and renewing our commitment to improving the lives of our Nation's veterans for years to come.
I want to share with you a couple of reasons why the GI bill is oftentimes referred to as the ``greatest legislation'' and share with you how it changed my life and really the life of my family.
After World War II, millions of returning veterans flooded our Nation's colleges, our universities, and our vocational schools. It was the GI bill that made financial support, education, and homegrown programs available to those 16 million veterans returning home and helped to usher in an era of unprecedented economic expansion.
According to the 1988 report from the Joint Economic Committee, it was estimated that for every $1 the United States invested in our GIs through the GI bill, about $7 were returned in economic growth for our country.
I am going to say that again. According to the Joint Economic Committee in 1988, it was estimated, for every $1 the United States invested in the GI bill, about $7 were returned to our economy. It is a pretty good return.
Those are big returns. I wish I could say for every dollar we invested in Federal Government spending that we got seven bucks back, in terms of economic growth. We don't. So this is something to know.
Thanks to the original GI bill, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 112,000 dentists, and thousands of other professionals entered our country's workforce, and many folks entered the workforce with skills in building trades, in assembly operations. You name it.
The GI bill truly democratized our higher education system. It established greater citizenship and civic participation and empowered the ``greatest generation''--my parents' generation--to lead our country following World War II.
At the end of World War II, my dad was the chief petty officer in the Navy and served until the end of World War II and a little bit after that and served many years after that as a chief petty officer in the naval reserve for, I think, 30 years in all. He came back. Before he went to work, he took advantage of the GI bill, and he had a real knack for fixing things and building things. He was very skilled in that regard. He had a high school education. He and my mom graduated from Shady Springs High School in Beaver, WV. They were married during World War II. My sister was born in 1945, and I was born in 1947. My dad used the GI bill, he once told me, to learn how to fix wrecked cars, how to be an auto body repairman. He ended up working at an Oldsmobile dealership in Beckley, WV, Burleson Oldsmobile, using the skills he gained from the GI bill. He worked there for a year or two. One day, a claims adjuster came in from the Nationwide Insurance company. Nationwide insured a car that was being repaired by my dad. The claims adjuster talked to my dad about the car and how it was coming. Somewhere in that conversation, the fellow from Nationwide Insurance said: You know, you could do what I do.
My dad said: You mean be a claims adjuster for Nationwide Insurance?
The guy said: Yes, you could do this. You have a lot on the ball.
Two years later, my father was a claims adjuster for Nationwide Insurance. He continued to repair wrecked cars as a hobby. We had any number of cars in our family that looked as good as new. He would take them on weekends and went to a garage and fixed them, painted them, and they were as good as new.
Out of that humble beginning as a claims adjuster for Nationwide Insurance--he was very proud of the work he did, but he ended up 20, 25 years later as one of the top instructors for Nationwide in their home office in Columbus, OH, teaching all the claims adjusters from across the country for Nationwide how to do the job adjusting claims, working on claims.
Here is a picture of my dad, Wallace Richard Carper. He went by Richard, his middle name, my middle name. He instructed a bunch of folks in the home office in the training school in Columbus, OH. Here he is with some of his compadres, some of the fellow teachers whom he worked with. It started with the GI bill.
I know people who used the GI bill to get an undergraduate degree or 2-year degree, associate's degree, a master's degree, a Ph.D. Not everybody used the GI bill for that. My father used it in a way that actually ended up enabling him to not only get a good blue-collar job but also actually to end up doing this kind of work as well. I am proud of him and thankful to the GI bill for helping him get started and serve as a role model for my sister and me.
My own career, I served 5 years on Active Duty as a midshipman, before that at Ohio State, and served 5 years in the Vietnam war, three tours in Southeast Asia. I wanted to stay in the Navy. I wanted to go to graduate school after my career. The Navy wasn't ready to send me to Monterey. I wanted to go to Monterey to graduate school. The Navy wasn't ready to send me to a postgraduate school. They said to come back and talk to them in a couple of years.
I wanted to go to graduate school. I entered my regular commission, took a Reserve commission, and moved from California to Delaware--the University of Delaware--and enrolled on the GI bill to go to graduate school.
The next weekend, after I showed up in Delaware, I drove up the road to Willow Grove Naval Air Station in Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia, and they were just getting the Navy P-3 aircraft. I had been a P-3 aircraft mission commander during the Vietnam war. I said: Are you looking for people who might help train these sailors at Willow Grove on how to use these P-3 airplanes?
He said: We need somebody. We need some help, and we are were happy to sign you up.
I flew with them for another 18 years and retired as a Navy captain.
Before I did those 18 years, I went to graduate school at the University of Delaware and earned an MBA, and that helped me go to work for the State of Delaware in economic development, right out of graduate school, and later had a chance to run for the State treasurer. Nobody wanted to run. In knowing I had an MBA from the University of Delaware, some people thought maybe I could be a pretty good State treasurer. We ended up starting with the worst credit rating in the country back in 1977, and 6 years later, we had doubled the credit rating. Pete du Pont was our Governor, and he was a great Governor.
I hope I helped a little bit along the way. That GI bill helped me in earning my MBA and, later, to have had a chance to have served in the House, then as Governor, and now here in the Senate. So I am deeply grateful to the people of this country for investing in me. I tried to work hard to repay that investment they made in me all those years ago.
Today's veterans can take advantage of the post-9/11 GI bill. It is an incredible benefit that pays the full cost of tuition at public colleges and universities, offers a generous housing allowance, and pays for books. It can even be transferred to veterans' spouses or children.
In 2017, I was proud when Congress enacted the Forever GI bill-- legislation that expanded the GI bill and strengthened the protection for our veterans, for Purple Heart recipients, for National Guard reservists, and for surviving spouses and children.
About 2 or 3 weeks ago, we had a send-off ceremony in the Delaware National Guard facility in Smyrna, DE, which is just north of Dover. There were 20 or so National Guard men and women. They were about to ship off for Iraq and other surrounding countries in that part of the world.
In my remarks to send them off and wish them well, I mentioned, when they come home, they will be eligible for the GI bill if they have a total of 36 months of service, which will enable them to go to college for free--to the University of Delaware, to Delaware State University, or to the Delaware Technical Community College. There will be no tuition, and books will be paid for. If they need tutoring, it will be paid for, and they will receive a $2,000-a-month housing allowance.
When we came back from Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam war, in the GI bill, we received a $250-a-month allowance for everything. That was it. It was all there. The GI bill that our veterans inherit today, receive today, is just incredibly generous and is, actually, very helpful in terms of recruiting people to serve in an all-volunteer military.
One of the aspects of the bill that I mentioned a minute ago was, if a GI doesn't use his or her GI bill, his or her spouse can use it. If his or her spouse doesn't use it, his or her dependent children can use it. Sometimes that happens, and I want to share one sad but, in the end, hopeful story about one servicemember's GI benefits.
His name was Christopher Slutman. He grew up not too far from Delaware, but he ended up serving in New York City as a fireman and had been one for 15 years. In the words of Winston Churchill, he was twice a citizen because, in addition to doing that, he served in the Reserves for a number of years--not in the Navy but in the Marines.
His unit was activated. He was activated, and he ended up in Afghanistan on Active Duty. He took leave from his day job as a firefighter in New York City to put on a different uniform and ship out with his colleagues to go to Afghanistan. He was serving there on Active Duty--a marine reservist activated--when, one day while on patrol within the Humvee, they ran across a bomb that exploded and killed him, Christopher Slutman, and killed two other marines who were in the vehicle.
Along with Chris Coons, my colleague here in the Senate; Lisa Blunt Rochester, our only Representative at large of the U.S. House of Representatives; our Governor, John Carney; the Secretary of Defense; the head of the Marine Corps; and a lot of other people, several days later, I stood on the flight line at Dover Air Force Base with the families of those three marines who died.
One of the people among the three families was Christopher Slutman's now widow. Shannon Metcalf Slutman was there, who has earned three degrees herself--her undergraduate from the University of Delaware, a master's degree, and a doctorate degree--and her three daughters were not. I think it was late at night. They were probably at home and probably in bed.
When Christopher Slutman died, he left behind a widow, and he left behind three little girls, ages 4, 8, and 10. His wife doesn't need to go to school any further. She is educated well beyond my dreams. Do you know what, though? They have three daughters, and we are going to make sure, when they are old enough to go to college, they will be able to inherit and use the GI bill's benefits that their father and their mother will never use.
A lot of times, we think about what the GI bill does to help servicemembers like me and like my dad, but it also helps a lot of families in ways we, maybe, never imagined. So I think we celebrate 75 years of the gift that this legislation provides to those survivors, like to the three Slutman girls, as they prepare to face the world without their father.
In closing, I am proud to join families across our country today in celebration of the importance of the GI bill over the last three- quarters of a century. It has enabled hundreds of thousands of veterans, including, as I said earlier, my dad and me, to pursue our dreams and to, hopefully, contribute in some way to our Nation and to our economy. This week, we reaffirm our commitment to making sure that all veterans today have similar experiences--maybe even better experiences--than we had and that they get the most out of their hard- earned GI bill benefits.
I ask all of my colleagues to join us today, here in this Chamber and across the country, in wishing the GI bill a happy 75th birthday. Here is to another 75 years of improving the lives of our Nation's veterans.
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