House Set to Spend $6.9B on Unwanted Military Equipment
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is poised to give the Pentagon dozens of new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the military does not need to fund next year, acting in many cases in support of political contributors from the defense industry under an approach the Obama administration has decried as "business as usual" and vowed to end.
The unwanted equipment in a military spending bill expected to come to a vote on the House floor Thursday has a price tag of at least $6.9 billion. The White House has said that some but not all of the extra expenditures could draw a presidential veto of the Defense Department's entire $636 billion budget for 2010, and it sent a message to House lawmakers Tuesday urging them to cut expenditures for items that "duplicate existing programs, or that have outlived their usefulness."
The dispute over Congress's insistence on additional spending for items such as the C-17 transport plane, a troubled missile defense interceptor program and the VH-71 presidential helicopter reflects a continuing struggle between Gates and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are loyal to existing military programs benefiting contractors that provide jobs and heavy campaign donations.
Gates vowed in April to fundamentally overhaul the military's "approach to procurement, acquisition and contracting" and urged Congress to back a shift from many traditional weapons programs toward spending on counterinsurgency efforts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But House lawmakers who support past priorities appear likely to prevail in this round, because an unusually restrictive rule for floor debate agreed upon Wednesday will only allow amendments to strip less than half of the spending the administration dislikes.
About $2.75 billion of the extra funds -- all of which were unanimously approved in an 18-minute-long markup Monday by the Democratic-controlled House Appropriations Committee -- would finance earmarks, or projects demanded by individual lawmakers that the Pentagon did not request. About half of that amount reflects spending requested by private firms, including 95 companies or related political action committees that donated a total of $769,190 to members of the appropriations subcommittee on defense, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group.
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a government spending critic who has long waged a campaign against such earmarks, has said he will try again Thursday to strike all such spending. But he appears to stand little chance of success, since his prior earmark-stripping efforts have succeeded only once in dozens of attempts, and never on defense spending.
"Simply put, Members of Congress should not have the ability to award no-bid contracts" to private firms, Flake said in a statement explaining the 540 proposed amendments he plans to bring up. "Many times the recipients of these earmarks are campaign contributors. The practice has created an ethical cloud over Congress, and it needs to end." He noted that at least 70 of the earmarks are for former clients of the PMA Group, a lobbying firm close to appropriations subcommittee chairman John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) that is being probed by the Justice Department and the House Ethics Committee.
Although President Obama has repeatedly criticized such earmarks, the White House statement of policy on the House bill obliquely criticized only "programs that fund narrowly focused activities." No mention was made of items such as a proposed $8 million Defense Department grant Murtha inserted for Argon ST, a Pennsylvania military contractor that has contributed $35,200 to him in the past four years, or of a $5 million grant Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) inserted for DRS Technologies, a Florida contractor that has contributed $46,350 to Young during that period, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
In addition to renewing its veto threat over F-22 fighter jet funding that Murtha has already agreed to remove from the bill, the White House specifically targeted the committee's addition of $400 million to finish five VH-71 presidential helicopters. Obama has said he does not want them, and Gates ridiculed them in a July 16 Chicago speech as helicopters that "cost nearly half a billion dollars each" and would enable the president to "cook dinner while in flight under nuclear attack."
Murtha countered a week later that he is upset at the idea that the Pentagon would spend $3.2 billion on such a program and "get nothing out of it. . . . That's unacceptable." He also suggested in a session with defense reporters that the Pentagon really did not want to kill the VH-1: "It's not the Defense Department. The Defense Department is speaking for the White House," he said.
Many lawmakers have similarly argued that despite what Gates and his top appointees have been saying, the military services have repeatedly let them know they want to continue programs formally stricken from the Pentagon's budget request. Gates tried to restrict such behind-the-scenes lobbying for weeks after his April announcement but eventually relented under sharp criticism from lawmakers and contractors.
Regarding the disputed C-17 transport aircraft, for example, senior defense officials have formally testified that those purchased in previous years, in combination with upgraded C-5 aircraft, will be sufficient to meet any conceivable military needs. But the committee added $674 million for three unwanted planes because, as a House staff member explained, "the Air Force will say on the record that they don't support it. But if you ask them off the record, if they will actually use the planes, they will say, 'Absolutely.' "
Source: Washington Post
