Washington D.C. – Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland (WA-10) called attention to the severe infrastructure challenges at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), highlighting the dangerous condition of Fire Station 105, which serves as the base’s only crash and rescue facility for C-17 aircraft. Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland’s remarks are transcribed below, and can be viewed here:
Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland: Mr. Chairman, thank you for recognizing me.
First, I will read Ranking Member Garamendi’s statement for the record.
This hearing, an annual fixture on the Readiness Subcommittee’s calendar, is an event of particular importance to the work we do—and also one that I often leave with a sense of frustration. This group of witnesses, all career civilians who have dedicated their working lives to providing support for our soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardians, and Marines, likely share some of my frustrations. Though you are too well-prepared to express those thoughts, you know from firsthand experience what happens when we underfund facilities sustainment accounts or fail to make our installations resilient to energy disruptions or natural disasters. You understand the cost, in both monetary terms and in how a lack of foresight in planning can impact the mission. There are human costs related to cuts of these budget lines that otherwise appear sterile on a budget spreadsheet.
And before I get into the substance of my remarks, I first want to thank you for your service. It is common practice these days to thank the admirals and generals who appear before us, but the career civilian workforce provides the backbone of our government agencies. So for that, we thank you for your service. In this time when the civilian workforce is actually under attack, I think it appropriate to recognize and publicly appreciate your service and thank you. In the last two years, there has been a renewed focus on infrastructure sustainment thanks to the good work of another set of professionals at GAO.
We were aghast to see poor conditions in which our servicemembers live, and a wave of witnesses came before us pledging to make things better, telling us that our personnel were our most important resource. Yet already, senior leaders are retreating from this position.
To varying degrees we’ve been told that the burden of sustaining our infrastructure, as is now required by statute, is just too much—that we can’t afford to dig ourselves out of the hole the Department has created for itself. I disagree. The requirement that some find so offensive was a bipartisan, bicameral provision in last year’s NDAA, which set a minimum investment for facilities sustainment accounts.
Last week, in our readiness program update with the Vice Chiefs, the Air Force told us that this year would see a renewed focus on sustainment. I hope that vow extends to infrastructure. What your comptrollers may see as a burden, I see as a moral obligation to the people who serve. We set a minimum requirement on investment in facilities not as punishment, but because the military departments have proven to us, year after year, that you won’t do it on your own. The requirement was born out of years of frustration stemming from this very hearing. For years, your predecessors testified about the risk the leaders in the Department of Defense were willing to take in our infrastructure accounts. We’ve paid the cost when storms or earthquakes ravaged the Department’s buildings—often because they had been under-sustained—and the recapitalization projects that would have brought them up to modern building standards deferred year after year. No more.
Even with this measure, I suspect your maintenance backlogs continue to grow, but at least it’s a start. Sadly, the neglect is not only in barracks and child development centers. It’s in infrastructure critical to operations: hangers, runway repair, and communication facilities to name a few examples. At the same time, we talk about our adversaries’ investments, we continue to ignore that investments in our installations are readiness enablers. This short-sightedness illustrates two areas that the Department continually ignores: addressing contested logistics risks and maintaining its facilities. I’m tired of hearing the same narrative out of the Pentagon, and I don’t accept it.
What makes things worse is that even when Congress adds funds to ensure the adequacy of facilities sustainment accounts, the DoD continues to see those accounts as a bill payer. As recently as Monday, there was reporting that the Administration is spending over $1.4 billion on the Southwest border. A close examination of the budget execution documents associated with the fiscal year 2025 full-year resolution shows that over a billion of that came from Army facilities sustainment, restoration, and modernization accounts. And while there are reasonable questions about how we secure the border, taking money from the Army’s vital infrastructure accounts is not how we should do it. If this reporting is accurate, it’s another example of selling out our servicemembers and the lack of commitment to sustaining our infrastructure.
I fully understand that the witnesses before us today are cogs in a very big machine. You give input, but the decisions are left to others. But fear not—I will address these issues again in other hearings with witnesses closer to the decision. That said, we rely on you to advocate for these programs, to use your years of experience (and) institutional knowledge to shape the narrative, and to offer the best advice you can based on fact, not ideology. The servicemembers and their families rely on you to do that because in the end, it’s the men and women who serve who pay the cost of diminished readiness. So I’m going to stop there, Mr. Chair, and that concludes Mr. Garamendi’s remarks.
Now I want to add a few of my own as Congresswoman Strickland, representing the 10th Congressional District of Washington State.
Mr. Chairman, I often tout Joint Base Lewis-McChord at every single hearing because of the important work they do as the country’s largest joint base and fourth-largest overall military installation. But I would be remiss if I did not highlight the infrastructure needs at JBLM. JBLM is the only Air Force base that is Army-led, and as a result, all of the real property on JBLM is owned by the Army. And while I understand the Army writ large has very compelling needs, this means that sometimes the needs of our airmen are left to the wayside. This includes Fire Station 105, which was built in 1952. This fire station is McChord’s sole crash, fire, and rescue capability for the 40 C-17s that our joint force depends on for strategic airlift. And I’m going to tell you something—you have to see it for yourself to believe the state of disrepair it’s in. It’s atrocious.
The fire station has received some band-aids over the years, but it fails to come even close to meeting current operational and safety requirements. This project kept being neglected on the Army’s military construction list, despite strong advocacy from the garrison and I Corps. It wasn’t until the firefighters at Joint Base Lewis-McChord brought this to my attention, had me do a site visit, and we were able to go after it to secure funding for planning and design. So that is progress.
Another Air Force priority that falls by the wayside is resolving the ongoing encroachment issues in the North Clear Zone. It took over two years for the first transaction to be completed, and there are 20 left to go. Now I understand how unique this project is, given that the Air Force is providing the majority of the funds, and the Army is managing the real estate transactions. But the services have failed to resolve this issue and it’s just unacceptable.
Since coming to Congress in 2021, I have been working in good faith with the Army to address the acute housing needs at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. And while I will address this specifically during my questions, I am extremely frustrated with the Army’s approach—or lack thereof—to ensuring military families are adequately housed. After four years of discussion, studies, and partnering to find solutions on and off the installation, it’s clear that the Army refuses to fully acknowledge and work to address the scope of this crisis.
However, I promise, all is not bad. We have made progress. I was pleased to attend the recent groundbreaking of over 200 homes at JBLM in March, and the groundbreaking of a first-of-its-kind barracks that is being built with sustainable building materials. But we need more housing at JBLM.
In 2021, JBLM opened its first-of-its-kind children’s museum—the only museum on a military base in the world, which has provided the children and families on base with not just a place to explore, play, and learn, but also connect as a community.
I’m also pleased that after several years of dedicated work by garrison and our local housing provider, complaints about on-base housing are down dramatically. That’s progress. There’s always more work to do, but it highlights what we can do when we work together to address big problems and take them seriously.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for your patience, and with that I yield back.
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