Congresswoman McCollum's Remarks on Prohibiting the Defense Department Funds to fund NASCAR

Mr. Chairman, my amendment ends tens of millions of taxpayer dollars from being wasted on the sponsorships of NASCAR race cars by the Department of Defense.

With trillion dollar deficits this amendment is where the rubber meets the road for my Republican-Tea Party colleagues who want to cut wasteful spending.

Defense Department waste is nothing new. Many Americans remember in the 1980s when the Pentagon was spending $400 for a hammer and $600 for a toilet seat.

Now we have the Army spending $7 million for a decal on a racing car. Talk about taxpayer sticker shock!

For $7 million the Army buys a decal on a race car and a few driver appearances.

But it's not only the Army that is spending millions. The Air Force sponsors a NASCAR race car for millions. So does the National Guard.

Incredibly, over the past decade hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars have subsidized race car owners and millionaire drivers in the name of military recruitment.

Here is the $7 million question: Does slapping a sticker on a race car convince a young man or woman to volunteer to serve our country in the armed forces?

Not according to the U.S. Marine Corps. In 2006, the Marine Corps dropped its sponsorship of NASCAR. A Marine Corps spokesman said at the time, "We don't have a tracking mechanism to track how many people contracted because of seeing that advertisement on the hood of the car."

The same year the Coast Guard dropped a $5 million NASCAR deal.

And, in 2008 the Navy dropped NASCAR sponsorship saying, "it's not always easy to measure the return on investment."

Unbelievably, that year the Navy paid one driver, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. the outrageous sum of $800,000 in taxpayer funds - twice the salary of the President of the United States - just to make public appearances.

For all the tough budget cutters in Congress you should know that Citizens Against Government Waste has endorsed this amendment.

So I would urge my Republican colleagues who are cutting homeless veterans, cutting law enforcement officers, and cutting firefighters, why not cut some real waste and at the same time free NASCAR from its dependency on the American taxpayer.

This amendment gives members a simple choice: vote to end wasteful spending, or vote to keep wasting the American peoples' money.

I urge a yes vote to end taxpayer funding to NASCAR.