Press Releases

“Eastern Connecticut is proud of its deep connection to our Coast Guard and excited to be the home of the planned National Coast Guard Museum in New London – the service’s first major national museum in its history,” said Courtney. “With nationwide fundraising efforts underway to design and build the new museum, I am committed to ensuring that Congress do all it can to support this worthy project. I am proud to have worked with Senator Blumenthal to secure a targeted change to federal law that ensures that the Coast Guard can provide its full support to making the rich treasure of artifacts for oldest maritime fleet available both to the American people and the world. This is a huge boost to national effort to create the long overdue museum, and sends a powerful signal that this effort has strong backing of the Congress, the federal government and the Coast Guard.”

Today, our surface warfare combatant fleet consists of destroyers, cruisers and the littoral combat ship. Due to the truncation or cancellation of recent surface navy recapitalization programs such as DD(X) and CG(X), our Navy is forced to rely on ships that were designed decades ago with different security challenges in mind. As a result, even if we achieve the shipbuilding levels laid out in the Navy’s current 30-year shipbuilding plan, we still face sustained periods of shortfalls in both our small and large surface combatant fleet. That means that we have to ensure that we are doing all we can to not only build up the size of our surface fleet, but also do more with the fleet we have.

“The important highway funding measure guarantees funding for five years, and finally moves us away from repeated short term extensions that continually kicked our national infrastructure needs down the road,” Representative Courtney said. “I strongly supported this funding bill as a first step, but our urgent national needs to rebuild our crumbling system of roads and bridges outstrips even the amount funded in this bill. We must continue to push for an adequately robust funding level that meets our infrastructure needs and provides a catalyst for jobs and economic growth.”

“There is no excuse for allowing suspected terrorists to purchase firearms,” said the delegation. “For the third time this week, House Republicans blocked a commonsense measure to keep those on the FBI’s Terrorist Watchlist from legally obtaining deadly weapons. This is unconscionable. For the safety of the American people, Congress must hold a vote to close this dangerous loophole.”

“Today’s 90-10 vote on the Heller Amendment in the Senate to repeal the Cadillac Tax demonstrates the overwhelming bipartisan support of our repeal efforts in both Houses of Congress,” said Representative Joe Courtney (CT-2). “I applaud Senators Heller, Heinrich, and Brown, as well as my otherSenate colleagues on joining the strong majority of the House, and the diverse group of stakeholders from every corner of our society in this fight. The overwhelming majority vote today reinforces that we can join together to improve the Affordable Care Act to keep health insurance affordable for every working family.”

“It has been 13 long years since ESEA has been rewritten, and I am proud to support this bipartisan effort to reform and update this law,” Courtney said. “The world has changed dramatically since No Child Left Behind was passed, and the needs of our children, our educators, and our workforce have evolved significantly in this time. I am particularly pleased that measure will upgrade our efforts to align K-12 education with the in-demand skills in science, technology engineering and math that is needed to keep pace with the needs of our country. This agreement also meets the needs of states, communities and educators in providing new and more flexible accountability systems. Bipartisan passage of this agreement reflects months – and years – of hard work dating back to my first days in Congress, and I am pleased to support it.”

As we know all too well on this subcommittee, we face a compounding series of challenges in achieving the fleet needed to support the needs of our nation. While the number of ships deployed globally has remained constant at about 100 for much of the last two decades, the number of ships in the fleet has shrunk by 20 percent during that same period - from 333 in 1998 to 272 today.

As we look ahead to the difficult fiscal picture we face in the coming years, it is going to be more important than ever that we utilize every tool available to us to ensure that we build the fleet we need. This is no time for business as usual, and we must consider every option to provide the resources stability and support needed to make critical investments in our future fleet.