Kurkowski Scores LoBiondo Over ‘Deepwater Fiasco’

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP — The following remarks were delivered Oct. 2 by Dave Kurkowski, Democratic candidate for Second Congressional District seat in the House of Representatives at the Atlantic County Democratic Party headquarters, 6716 Black Horse Pike:
Thank you all for coming out this afternoon, members of the press as well as many of you who I hope to soon be addressing as constituents. It’s great to be back here in Atlantic County, where there are so many new Democratic voters, invigorated by our great presidential candidate Barack Obama and ready to bring change to this country, this state, and to Washington. This is truly a historic year and I’m excited to be a part of it.
You know, a couple of days ago I was in Vineland for a debate that my opponent decided to join only 24 hours before it began. This is rather interesting. And it signals that despite his lead in the polls, Frank LoBiondo knows he is not going to coast to another term in Congress. He knows we are taking the fight to him. He knows we are giving him the first real challenge he’s faced in years. He knows that we are going to continue to be relentless in getting the truth out about his record in Congress, and about the fact that he has exploited a local reputation here in South Jersey at the expense of the real, everyday interests of the voters.
It was something, you know. In Vineland he kept complaining about “negative campaigning.” As I said two weeks ago here, there is nothing negative about what I am saying. I am simply getting the facts out. I am pointing to the public record. To my opponent’s votes. To his performance as a Member of Congress. LoBiondo may see it as “negative” that people know the truth about his record. To an extent, that’s understandable. He doesn’t have much of a record to stand on. He has exploited and cultivated a reputation that does not reflect the truth about his record. I am not going to stop talking about his record just because he throws out these phony charges of negative campaigning.
You know, in Vineland he even referred to me as using “30 second soundbites” to hold him accountable. This is really something. I wish that he were correct here — that I had the resources to buy 30 second commercials in this expensive media market. LoBiondo is clearly mouthing talking points that he hasn’t even spent the time to think through. To the contrary, I am not a sound-bite candidate. I will not be a sound-bite Congressman. You know, I take this race very seriously. I demand that everything we put out about my opponent is double checked, and triple-checked, and is 100% factual. As the reporters here will attest, my press releases are footnoted. I don’t do spin. These empty charges from LoBiondo are indicative of his weak position. He knows he is vulnerable, and so he puts out these “negative campaigning” talking points. There’s nothing to it. Period.
So here are the facts. Frank LoBiondo has toed the George W. Bush line for the past eight years on all of the major issues, including the economy and the war in Iraq. And he has made a science out of gaming the system, casting strategic votes that allow him to claim he is somehow “independent” when in fact he is nothing more than an enabler of the failed Bush agenda that has landed this nation in financial and international peril. We are calling him out on his phony claims, you bet we are.
Frank LoBiondo has no seniority or authority in the United States Congress, despite his claims otherwise. He has hoodwinked the people of this district into thinking he is somehow the “most influential politician in South Jersey,” as was shown in the recent poll by the Press of Atlantic City. This just is not true. My opponent has been ranked as the least effective member of Congress among the entire New Jersey delegation, from both parties. Among his peers in the class of 1994, he is 30th out of 31. He is a failure. Plain and simple.
My opponent has never held a position in his party’s leadership. He has never chaired a Congressional committee. He has authored no major legislation in 14 years. In fact, only three of his own bills ever became law—this so-called ‘influential’ lawmaker consistently has to rely on others to get things done. These are facts. And as the saying goes, facts are stubborn things.
He is a clever politician, to be sure. He uses strategic votes to allow himself to have it both ways when called to account. But we are calling him out this time around. His last-minute decision to appear at the Vineland debate certainly indicates we’ve gotten his attention. He wanted to be there to try to portray us as “negative.” But let me be perfectly clear. We stand by our statements. We are going to keep it up. The people of South Jersey need to know the truth about Frank LoBiondo. Facts are stubborn things.
You know, since we kicked out the Republicans two years ago, my opponent’s own party has not even seen fit to appoint him as ranking Republican on a single one of the 95 subcommittees in Congress. He doesn’t seem to be impressing them any more than he is impressing us. In seven terms, his one experience leading a subcommittee saw billions of taxpayer dollars squandered in waste, fraud, and abuse by military contractors. That is the topic I want to address today, the “Deepwater” fiasco.
As I’ve been saying for months now, my opponent has become something of an expert at dodging accountability. Deepwater is a case in point, probably the case in point. Although his successor on the Coast Guard subcommittee, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, took the story to CBS News’ 60 Minutes, as we saw in the video clip earlier, Deepwater generated only a couple of stories in the national press. We need to right the record. We need to shine a light on the abuses and failures of Frank LoBiondo as steward of the peoples’ trust and, in his one and only position of authority, in 14 years in Washington, his failure to live up to his responsibilities.
And I want to remind you that at the Vineland forum, I was not the only one asking LoBiondo to explain his failures in the Deepwater scandal. To all of us who raised the issue, LoBiondo dodged the question—something we have learned to expect from him. He’s passed the buck before, and this time he passed it to someone new, President Bill Clinton. I will admit it, I didn’t know what to make of this. The last time I checked, it was Frank LoBiondo who was chairman of the Coast Guard subcommittee, not Bill Clinton. His party was in the majority in Congress and controlled oversight, and the budget. How on earth can he try to pass his own authority off to the president?
So, now, what is “Deepwater”? Well, following 9/11, it became clear that we needed to revamp our border security overall, and our port and maritime security in particular. Frank LoBiondo was finally promoted to a subcommittee chairmanship, overseeing the Coast Guard.
While he served out five years in that position, the Coast Guard underwent a massive program of modernization that is known as Deepwater. Incredibly, it is still not completed—as a result of the five years of boondoggle that occurred on LoBiondo’s watch.
Now, let me explain to you a bit about the dynamics of Congressional committees. I’m a Political Science Ph.D., after all—though I’ll try to keep this from becoming a lecture! All kidding aside, voters need to understand the authority that was entrusted to my opponent, and how he failed, so completely, in living up to his responsibilities.
The committees of Congress are charged with oversight of the executive branch and the military services of which the President is commander in chief. The Coast Guard Subcommittee, as with the many other subcommittees, has as a prime responsibility the monitoring of how taxpayer dollars are spent on funding projects. The oversight committees are tasked with keeping an eye on the ledger and preventing waste or fraud or abuse. As chairman of the Coast Guard subcommittee, my opponent possessed the power to subpoena anyone he felt needed to testify publicly about how government contracts were or were not being carried out. He held substantial power.
He failed to use it in the taxpayers’ interest. His failure cost us billions—yes, billions— and cost the Coast Guard years in readiness and endless hardship for its devoted servicemen and women, who paid the price personally for the botched projects and endless delays that became the hallmark of Deepwater.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit. What exactly were the problems with these Coast Guard contracts?
Well, two reports by the Government Accountability Office and an investigation by the Department of Justice have only begun to shine a light on the waste, fraud, and abuse that went on. We still don’t have the full story. Since the Democrats took over from LoBiondo and his cronies two years ago, the effort to clean up the mess has been ongoing. A Deepwater Reform Act recently passed Congress. What is noteworthy is that Frank LoBiondo was not among its co-sponsors. As usual, he had Washington double-talk explanations for why he couldn’t bring himself to be a part of cleaning up the mess he helped create.
Essentially, the problem with Deepwater was that LoBiondo and the Republicans outsourced oversight and accountability. As you see on my right here, these were the exact words of the Coast Guard Commandant last year when he was called before Congress to testify: We cannot outsource the duties of government.
Rather than exercise the oversight responsibility of his subcommittee, LoBiondo relied on military contractors like Lockheed Martin to “self-police”: To monitor their own progress on construction projects and report back to the Coast Guard and to Congress. It is a harsh verdict to render, but it sure seems as though my opponent simply wasn’t up to the task of running an oversight committee. He left it to others. In fact, he left it to the very people he was supposed to be keeping an eye on.
If you plough through the GAO reports, and the recent hearings, you will find a lot of bureaucratic language. But ultimately what happened was that the cost of letting the kids run free in the candy store resulted in a massive bill for the taxpayer. The military contractors did not adequately oversee their projects. Subsequent investigations by the new Democratic majority revealed poorly managed projects and even cover-ups. We had whistle-blowers who were so stonewalled by the powers-that-be that they resorted to posting video on YouTube. I’m not making this up.
Some of the bad decisions of Deepwater had to do with complex internal decisions within companies like Lockheed Martin, things like assigning unqualified people to engineering tasks. Some of the outcomes were downright comical, that is, if they hadn’t come with such a huge price tag: Cutting apart Coast Guard ships and attempting to stretch them out with metal panels, like stretch limos. Wow. When you read the reports on these bizarre projects, it’s hard to imagine they actually happened.
And then there were the millions spend for on-ship radio systems that didn’t provide adequate security for classified transmissions…and weren’t waterproof.
That’s right: Radios for Coast Guard boats that weren’t waterproof. Now, who was minding the store while all of this went on? Frank LoBiondo.
And my staff has been looking into this. We have been in touch with numerous sources on Capitol Hill who were involved in these proceedings. To a person, the view is that Frank was cheerleader number one for these negligent contractors while he made no effort to get to the bottom of the mess that was expanding exponentially, on his watch. This is not your run-of-the- mill million-dollar Washington boondoggle. We are talking about billions of dollars. Billions.
The responsibility of a chairman of an oversight committee is to keep watch on the activities of those we entrust with the taxpayers’ dollars. My opponent failed to do this. It is no shocker that his own party refused to appoint him to a ranking position on a single one of Congress’ 95 subcommittees. He was demoted to the fifth spot on the Coast Guard Subcommittee. Small wonder, after the 60 Minutes story and the rest of the bad press.
The responsibility of a chairman of a military oversight committee, I should add, is also to look out for the interests of the servicemen and women who have dedicated their lives to protecting this country. Because it is not the job of the military—the Coast Guard in this case—to conduct oversight over contractors who are building new ships or aircraft or other technology. This is why we have a Congress. As I refer to Admiral Allen’s quote here, my opponent saw fit to “outsource” these duties. My opponent failed in his oversight role, continuing his pattern of refusing to accept responsibility.
In fact, he passed the buck to the military, to the Coast Guard, even going so far as to tell the Commandant that—get this—“there has to be some accountability” for the debacle of Deepwater.
Frank LoBiondo: It was your responsibility to ensure accountability in the way these contracts were carried out. In the way billions of tax dollars were spent. In the way the interests of the Coast Guard were taken into account. In the way the safety of the nation was taken into account. You were asleep on the job. We paid the price. Literally. To the tune of billions of dollars.
And at the same time that all of this waste and fraud was going on, over a period of five years, my opponent was accepting thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the same military contractors who were flushing taxpayer dollars down the drain. Enough is enough. LoBiondo must be held accountable.
We can not allow this kind of behavior. That’s why I’m running for Congress.
My opponent has made it his trademark to cultivate a positive image here in South Jersey. As we saw in the poll last week, many see him as the “most influential” politician in the area. This is simply not true. He has been ranked the least effective member of the entire New Jersey Congressional delegation. But we have to admit, he has good name recognition. He plays his cards right.
In the case of Deepwater, he has managed to avoid accountability for failing to protect the interests of the taxpayers—not just of New Jersey but of the entire nation—and for passing the buck to the Coast Guard for his own failure to conduct oversight during a contracting fiasco that, as I’ve said, included almost comically botched projects such as cutting ships in half and welding panels onto them to increase their bow lengths. I really do wish I could say I was making this up.
So where does this leave us?
It leaves us with a failed, and costly, incumbent Member of Congress. It leaves us with a disastrous pile of debt. It leaves us, in this specific case, with a Coast Guard that is still underequipped and whose service members are paying the price.
Not to mention the national security implications.
But ultimately we should look at Deepwater and have the courage to see that “one of our own,” Frank LoBiondo, was a failure when it came to carrying out his duty in the Congress. It is time to hold him to account.
His phony claims of influence and effectiveness are belied by his record. I’m running for Congress because the people of South Jersey deserve better. Because the Coast Guard deserves better. Because the nation deserves better.
Thank you.