Ranking Member Courtney Delivers Remarks on Annual Defense Bill
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today at the House Armed Services Committee markup, Congressman Joe Courtney, Ranking Member of the House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks on the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. Courtney spoke on Seapower and Projection Forces provisions within the bill and how maintaining steady submarine procurement is critical to US national security, AUKUS, and the industrial base.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to join my friend, Trent Kelly, the Chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, in endorsing the FY2025 mark, which incorporates the input from numerous hearings, briefings, and detailed analysis by our outstanding professional staff. Each member of this subcommittee actively participated in this process, which was conducted in a compressed timeframe due to the lateness of the budget submission. Chairman Kelly has once again demonstrated his leadership skills in this mark and I congratulate him for his efforts.
Obviously, the biggest challenge we faced stemmed from the Navy’s proposal to eliminate a Virginia Class Submarine from the budget – a sharp deviation from the two-per-year procurement rate that Congress has authorized and appropriated for the last 13 years. This surprising cut reversed the Navy’s last year’s Future Years Defense Plan submitted just last year, which Congress relied on to appropriate close to a billion dollars of advanced procurement funding for the submarine in question.
In defending this cut, assurances were made that this advanced procurement fund would provide a cushion for supply chain vendors. Our subcommittee hearings revealed, in fact, that:
- Those vendors will suffer a cut in work when their long lead materials are consumed by a future submarine; and
- The Navy failed to provide for an additional $1 billion of supply chain work that is separate from advanced procurement.
This is not just a gotcha quibble. For critical supply chain companies who have millions of dollars in investment decisions to make, the sudden about-face in the Navy’s budget undermines the steady progress that Congress made to eliminate procurement instability and grow the submarine industrial base.
Even more baffling, this sharp move comes on the heels of last December’s NDAA, where Congress authorized, for the first time in history, the sale of U.S. nuclear-powered submarines to our ally, Australia, as required by the AUKUS agreement. Those sales in 2032, 2035, and 2038 are subject to a Presidential certification that the transfer of those submarines will not have a negative impact on our own undersea fleet. Taking a submarine out of our inventory, which is already below the Navy’s requirement of 66 attack submarines, will make that decision more difficult. That’s not just an opinion – it’s simple math.
For the sake of AUKUS, we should today make that decision easier by restoring the submarine in the FY25 budget which is called for in the mark. I would note, Chairman Rogers, that last week when the mark was released restoring the submarine, one of the major Australian daily newspapers reported on that decision contained the headline “AUKUS Back on Track!” which speaks volumes about the heartburn the Navy’s budget caused in that nation.
For the people of Australia – a country of only 26 million – who are making an AUKUS investment of over $350 billion and an investment of $3 billion in the US submarine industrial base – I think it is imperative that we match their commitment by keeping our submarine construction plan on track as the headline declares.
In closing, for those who fret about production cadence, I want to remind them that the USS New Jersey was delivered last month, and USS Iowa and USS Massachusetts are slated for delivery by the end of this year. And Idaho and Arkansas will follow with deliveries in 2025. The rate of production, despite the naysayers, is recovering from the COVID dip, and our mark should continue that indisputable trend as we have for the last 13 years. Our mark does so, with a credible pay-for and within the very tight spending cap mandated by the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
I want to close by giving special thanks to the incredibly talented staff on our subcommittee – Phil MacNaughton, Ian Bennitt, Kelly Goggin, Kyle Noyes, and Ethan Pelissier, as well as personal staff Sean Falvey and our Navy Fellow Lieutenant Commander Darren Sill, for their outstanding work in crafting this bipartisan product. I urge all members of the committee to vote in support.