Senator Bob Corker, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, on Thursday released the following statement after voting against the fiscal year 2017 omnibus spending bill.
“While this bill funds a number of important priorities, I could not support it because it increases spending by using the OCO slush fund without appropriately offsetting those increases in other places.
Every day that goes by, our fiscal situation becomes more of a threat to our country’s national security.”
He said the fiscal year 2017 omnibus spending bill designates $104 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), exceeding the recommended amount agreed to in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 by $30 billion.
Senator Corker said, "OCO is intended to provide emergency funding for military missions overseas but has been repeatedly abused to fund normal operations at the Departments of Defense and State in order to avoid exceeding statutory spending caps."
Senator David Perdue (R-GA) said, “President Trump is undertaking an ambitious turnaround of the federal government. His first funding bill is a step in the right direction to move forward after eight years of dysfunction. However, both the President and Congress are still hamstrung by the broken budget process.
"Too many in Washington will only negotiate when there is an ultimatum between funding the federal government or stopping everything in its tracks. We need to break through this vicious cycle by changing the budget process and putting in place a politically neutral platform that responsibly funds the government on time.
"Fixing the budget process is a prerequisite to solving our nation's debt crisis, and I will continue to work directly with President Trump and OMB Director Mulvaney to make sure we don’t take our eye off the bigger picture.”