Air Force Tanker Decision

AIR FORCE TANKER DECISION -- (House of Representatives - June 18, 2008)

(Mr. SMITH of Washington asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, the GAO is scheduled this week to decide whether or not to overturn the Air Force decision on awarding the tanker contract to Airbus. We have already heard this morning that the Air Force has discovered that they made numerous mistakes in how they calculated the cost.

There is another huge issue. We hope the GAO does the right thing and overturns that decision, but even if they don't, we have to keep in mind that our country has a trade action against Airbus right now for unfairly and illegally subsidizing their products, the very product that the Air Force has decided to buy.

If we want to enforce our trade laws against our trading partners to our advantage, it makes no sense whatsoever to reward precisely the illegal, unfair behavior that we are trying to stop them from doing. Giving them this contract does that, and we should overturn it either by the GAO or by Congress if they don't and not reward unfair subsidization by our foreign competitors.

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