00:00Are there other Senators to which to speak on this amendment?
00:07Senator Van Wallen.
00:08Thank you, thank you, Chair Collins.
00:11And I want to start where I started last week, I think was exactly a week ago,
00:17which is thanking my colleague, Senator Moran and his team,
00:21for working to put together what was overall a very strong piece of legislation
00:28for Commerce State Justice.
00:30It didn't have all the resources we wanted to be able to work with,
00:34but I think with what we were allocated, we chose wisely.
00:39And again, I want to thank you for that effort.
00:43But I have to say, having just sat through the conversation before the break
00:48about what this committee can do to uphold bipartisanship, this is the opposite.
00:57Because what happened was a bipartisan amendment that was adopted is now being proposed to
01:08be stripped out in what I agree with Senator Moran and all our checking is an unprecedented way.
01:14And I want to underscore the fact that my original amendment with respect to the funds that have
01:22been set aside to build the FBI at a site that was selected was not just about Maryland and Van Hollen.
01:33This was actually a bipartisan process over many years.
01:38And what happened was the Trump administration came in and they proposed a de facto rescission of the funds.
01:47This is exactly what we were talking about last night in a different form.
01:52Because those monies had been set aside for the purpose not of going to Maryland,
01:58but of going to the site that was selected through a non-partisan process of experts
02:05that would meet the security requirements of the men and women of the FBI
02:10and the mission requirements of the FBI.
02:13This has been a long bipartisan process.
02:18And so when we got the request for reprogramming from the FBI,
02:24I had hoped that we would on a bipartisan basis say,
02:30no, we're not going to accept your reprogramming request because it flies in the face of longstanding bipartisan support for this process.
02:40We did not do that.
02:42And so I offered the amendment to make sure that we defend that process.
02:48And Madam Chair, I do want to just take a moment for our colleagues to emphasize again the bipartisan nature of this decision over many years.
02:57Because this battle is not going away.
03:00You know, as the chairman said, it became a partisan vote,
03:03but it was only a partisan vote because the Republican side of the committee decided to vote no after a bipartisan amendment was adopted.
03:15And so this is a microcosm of the overall challenge that we are facing.
03:22And I would have hoped that as a committee that we stood up for that bipartisan decision.
03:27So let me just, Madam Chair, I'm going to put a couple things in the record.
03:32Because I want to make it clear once and for all that this is not just a process that was invented by Senator Van Hollen.
03:42It was actually invented by all of us where we delegated the decision to the FBI and the GSA.
03:50And it began many, many years ago actually when a prospectus was submitted to the Congress.
03:59The way this works is the Environment and Public Works Committee in the Senate and the House Transportation Committee look at prospectuses that are proposed for new buildings.
04:10And the prospectus was adopted on a bipartisan, unanimous basis by those committees years ago.
04:18And just to make it clear that this was not a sort of one-sided democratic process,
04:24the chair of the House Transportation Committee was Bill Schuster.
04:28And the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at the time was Senator Jim Inhofe.
04:36They adopted the prospectus.
04:40And here's what the prospectus said, and I'm quoting,
04:45The facility will be built to meet ISC, these are the security requirements, ISC level 5 security specifications on one of the three previously identified sites.
05:00Two had been identified in Maryland, one in Virginia.
05:04So there you have on a bipartisan basis a decision being made that whichever of those three sites won the competition
05:12to meet the security and mission requirements of the FBI would be chosen.
05:17It didn't end there.
05:18The document will be included in the record.
05:21Thank you, thank you, Madam Chair.
05:23It didn't end there.
05:24If you look, and I'm not going to belabor all the reporting that this committee has done over time on this issue,
05:30but suffice to say that this committee has made clear what the purpose of the funds were,
05:35both in the Department of Justice FBI account and in the GSA account, which is in the FISG bill.
05:42But just for one example, this is the omnibus bill that we all, all of us who were here at the time,
05:49back in 2022, voted for, at least those of us who voted for the bill,
05:54which I think most of the members of the Appropriations Committee did.
05:57It says this, the administrator of the General Services Administration shall,
06:04shall select a site from one of the three listed in the General Services Administration's fiscal year 2017 prospectus,
06:14which I just read from, for a new facility consolidated Federal Bureau of Investigations headquarters.
06:21Such decisions shall be made in an expeditious manner as possible.
06:25So, again, the authorizing committees, on a bipartisan basis, set up this process to pick from one of three sites,
06:34because all three sites were determined that time to meet the security requirements,
06:37but they wanted to pick the best one.
06:39And we ratified that.
06:40And I would ask that this be submitted for the record, Madam Chair.
06:43Without objection.
06:45And I would ask, Madam Chair, that that, that the final decision announcement from the GSA be put in the record.
06:54Without objection.
06:55And it wasn't, it wasn't Van Hollen or Senator Mikulski or anybody else that picked this site.
06:59It was the result of a process set up in a bipartisan way by all of us around this table.
07:04And that's what I was trying to protect.
07:06Now, I do want to say one more thing.
07:10Because my view is that we should be preserving decisions that we previously made.
07:17And everything we just talked about before the break was about that.
07:20And here was our opportunity to do it.
07:22In my view, we did.
07:23And now we're trying to undo it.
07:25All of a sudden, the FBI decided that they wanted to move to the Ronald Reagan building.
07:30No security analysis.
07:33No cost estimate.
07:35And I would just remind my colleagues that when President Trump came into office last time,
07:40he also did not want to move to one of these three sites.
07:44He wanted to keep the FBI building in its current location.
07:48And they came down and provided a two-pager, which we haven't even gotten a two-pager yet, to my knowledge.
07:54But they came down here and they said, this is going to meet all the requirements.
07:59It's going to meet the security requirements.
08:02And it's going to meet the mission requirements.
08:04Well, that's what they say now.
08:07At least they've said that to some people.
08:09They've informed staff that they have just done a walk-through.
08:15And they haven't determined what the security situation is.
08:19That's something to come, even though they're considering putting people in the building before they do that.
08:23But, colleagues, I do just want to say that when the first Trump administration proposed to essentially renovate the existing Hoover Building for the FBI headquarters
08:35and made these representations that it was going to be just fine, that there were two Inspector General reports issued.
08:44One was the Inspector General of the Department of Justice.
08:49And they found, and I encourage my colleagues to read it carefully, that, in fact, the proposal did not meet the Level 5 security requirements
09:03that had been established on a bipartisan basis.
09:06That was what the Inspector General of the Justice Department concluded with respect to that earlier proposal.
09:12And I ask unanimous consent that this Inspector General's document be put in the record.
09:16Without objection.
09:17And it wasn't just the DOJ Inspector General.
09:21It was also the Inspector General of GSA.
09:26They reached similar conclusions about the earlier Trump administration's proposal to keep the headquarters where it was
09:34and determine that representations that had been made that it would meet the security requirements were just unfounded.
09:40And I ask unanimous consent that this Inspector General's report be put in the record.
09:46Without objection.
09:48Now, colleagues, finally, I would point out that there's a statute that was adopted when the Ronald Reagan Building was created,
09:57making it clear what the purposes of that building were,
10:01including a number of tenants in the International Trade Administration.
10:06It's supposed to be a sort of a center for trade and commerce.
10:09And there are also a lot of other tenants in that building now.
10:12Some public agencies, the National Children's Museum, a non-public agency is part of that building.
10:20We see no plan as to what's supposed to happen to all those tenants in the building.
10:26So, we have to be real that this was something that thought has not really been put into it.
10:35We have a selected site that was based on competition, based on analysis of security requirements,
10:43based on analysis of FBI admission requirements.
10:47It took way too long, I'll acknowledge that.
10:49But a decision was finally made pursuant to a bipartisan process that I didn't set up.
10:55We all set it up.
10:56And now they propose to undo that.
11:01So, I would say this is a microcosm of exactly what we were talking about before the break.
11:07Whether this committee is going to stand up for the work it's done on a bipartisan basis.
11:10I didn't know that Maryland would be selected in the end.
11:13But that's the process we set up.
11:15And that is why that bipartisan amendment was important.
11:19And, Madam Chair, we talk about 60 votes on the floor of the Senate.
11:23I would suggest that it's pretty crazy that this amendment that was to stand up for congressional
11:31prerogatives would then be the reason our Republican colleagues on the committee decide not to support it.
11:40That's exactly the problem that we've been having.
11:42It's not just the President of the United States.
11:46It's all of us.
11:48And so, I will strongly oppose this amendment.
11:53And I have to say, Madam Chair, that as I said earlier, if this is stripped out, I will change my vote to no.
12:04And again, not just because of this.
12:07It's Maryland.
12:08I mean, this goes to the heart of everything we've been talking about here.
12:12Reversing a decision and process that we made over many years.
12:16So, I appreciate my colleagues listening to me about this.
12:21It's not going away.
12:23Because we have collectively spoken on it for very many years.
12:27And I would urge the director of the FBI to not try to rush to move in to the FBI building.
12:38First of all, because they haven't done the security analysis.
12:42They're going to need this committee for additional resources going forward.
12:46The resources that we put aside over many years were a down payment.
12:51And in my view, this has been an abuse of process.
12:57And so, it's going to be hard to envision sustaining support for a decision that undid what we did over so many years and resulted in a competition, a choice in a competition.
13:12None of us knew what the result would be.
13:14But it was made.
13:15We set up the process.
13:16And now we're not sticking with it.
13:18So, Madam Chair and colleagues, I urge you to vote against the motion to strike.
13:23And if it carries, I hope we will vote against final passage.
13:29As much as that pains me because of all the other good things that were in there.
13:33But I can't understand why a bipartisan amendment standing up for what we've done on a bipartisan basis over the years would cause our colleagues to flip on the other side.
13:44It's the root of the problem that we're dealing with.
13:48All right.
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