Pork! Get your farm fresh pork! $8.9 billion in pork here!
Phil Carter - Intel dump.
Winslow T. Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, writes in today's Washington Post Outlook that Congress has seen fit to include billions and billions of dollars of pork in this year's $416 billion defense appropriations bill. Of course, there's a war on, so you'd expect a spike in defense spending. But as Mr. Wheeler writes, this money isn't going to help the troops or even to help things tangentially related to supporting the troops — it's pure, unadulterated, USDA Grade A pork.
If you look at the hidden details of the legislation, it's clear that Congress has failed dismally — and deliberately — to fulfill its constitutional mandates to "raise and support armies" and to "provide and maintain a navy."
Legislators have amply demonstrated that what they're really interested in is raising and providing some home-state pork to impress voters in an election year. To that end, they have busied themselves with squeezing funds for war essentials such as training, weapons maintenance and spare parts — things troops in combat need more, not less, of — to send extra dollars their constituents' way. And it's equal-opportunity raiding: Both Republicans and Democrats have been fully engaged in this behavior. Even Capitol Hill's self-proclaimed "pork buster," Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has made a regular practice of calling his colleagues on their gluttony, has essentially given the gorging a wink and a nod.
A pork-hungry Congress has long been with us, of course, but this year, with our armed forces engaged on two major fronts, Congress has pushed the pork in the defense budget to an all-time high, totaling $8.9 billion. And even as they did so — and voted to fund wartime operations at only a fraction of what nearly all analysts agree is needed for the duration of 2005 — conservatives, liberals and moderates alike have presented themselves as doing everything they can think of to support the troops in the field. Don't believe it.
A brief examination of how the Senate, where I worked for three decades for senators from both parties, handled the defense appropriations bill this summer illustrates the chasm between appearances and reality. On June 24, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Alaska Republican Ted Stevens, rammed the $416 billion bill through the Senate in just a few hours. Forty-two amendments, the majority of them involving small spending projects promoted by senators with an eye on bringing home the bacon, were adopted by unrecorded "voice" votes — usually after cursory deliberation that failed even to explain the subject matter.
The next day's Congressional Record provided some details when it printed the text of the amendments. There, for example, you can find the amendment offered by Democratic Sen. Max Baucus for a grant to Rocky Mountain College in his state of Montana for three Piper aircraft and a simulator, and Republican Sen. Rick Santorum's $3 million add-on for an unbudgeted artificial lung device for the Army. By the time Congress had finished with the bill in July, House and Senate members had added more than 2,000 of these "earmarks," thereby achieving their new porcine record. Some of these items had at least some tenuous relevance to defense, but many didn't. None, though, had been included in the defense budget put together by DOD and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and there was subsequently little, if any, objective evaluation — for instance, either by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) or in a congressional hearing — of their cost and efficacy. Each one was literally a pig in a poke.
Analysis: The problem is not just "pork" — which my friend on the Hill defines as those things added to the budget by Congress after the President submits the bill for consideration. The problem is also "fat" — which he defines as those things put in the bill by the President and Defense Department when it comes over to the Hill. Those things, which Fred Kaplan has written about for Slate, include such unnecessary items such as:
- $4.1 billion for 24 F-22 Raptor "stealth" planes, and $4.6 billion for R&D into future generations of stealth aircraft
- $2.5 billion for a new Navy Virginia-class nuclear sub
- $10.7 billion for missile defense
... and the list goes on. If you plumb the depths of the National Defense Authorization Act and the annual defense appropriations bill, you will find tons and tons of fat — added to the bill before it ever saw the light of day. Add in some pork on top of this fat, and you get one incredibly wasteful piece of government spending.
I try to take long view here, in seeing that some of these projects (like missile defense) implicitly subsidize the defense industry and scientific industry in order to keep critical parts of our military-industrial complex at work during peacetime. I also try to be optimistic that some of these projects might actually lead to fieldable, fightable systems down the road — it would be really great to have an inpenetrable missile defense system some day. But I'm also a bit jaded, and I think that's probably naivete on my part. The fact of the matter is that we can't afford to dole out billions in pork and fat when our soldiers go without up-armored HMMWVs for 18 months in combat, or Interceptor body armor for the same time, or when our National Guard soldiers drive trucks older than they are, or when our Guard and Reserve troops go to war unprepared because there wasn't any extra money to hold extra training days before deployment. We are a nation at war, and we must evaluate the use of every resource to ensure that it is going to victory.
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