PENTAGON POLITIX: The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security by Winslow Wheeler Part 1 of 2
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Interviewed November 7, 2004
BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Winslow Wheeler, author of "The Wastrels of Defense," where`d you get that title? And is it wastrels?
WINSLOW WHEELER, AUTHOR, "THE WASTRELS OF DEFENSE": Yes. I actually thought of it in the mid-`80s, when I wrote a little piece about the Senate Armed Services Committee and what it was doing to military construction authorizations. And I was paging through the dictionary, and I found that word. And it`s sort of an archaic word, but it fit my conception of what they were up to. It`s -- different dictionaries say it means different things, but it`s basically a wasteful, foolish person, somebody who doesn`t fulfill his own potential.
LAMB: Who is that?
WHEELER: Congress. They have duties and lots of intelligent, hard-working people over there, but the end result is pretty disappointing.
LAMB: How many years did you work for the United States government in some way or another?
WHEELER: I started in November of `71 with Jacob Javits, a liberal Republican from New York. I was from New York, and I was lucky. I was wandering the halls with resumes, and I got the dream job. I got a research assistant`s job for work on the Foreign Relations Committee. I worked for him for 10 years, then I worked for Nancy Kassebaum from Kansas, Republican. Last two years with her, I was simultaneously employed on the personal staff of David Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas.
The clerk at the disbursing office told me that when I took my forms over there for that, that I was the first ever staffer to work simultaneously for members from different parties on their personal staffs. I did that for two years.
I bailed out of Congress -- I got a little sick of it -- and went to the General Accounting Office -- they changed the name -- for nine years, got a little frustrated with the bureaucracy there and the management attitude towards research, and had a chance to go back to the Senate, on the Senate Budget Committee staff, with Pete Domenici from New Mexico, a Republican.
LAMB: Who`s Spartacus?
WHEELER: I adopted that pseudonym when I was asked to write a chapter for an anthology. A friend of mine, an active duty Army major named Don Vandergriff, wrote a -- edited an anthology on warfare issues, and he asked me to write a chapter about how Congress budgets for defense. And getting through it, I realized what I was writing would get me in trouble. I was naming names and describing actions that the members wouldn`t appreciate. So I thought about it, and rather than "anonymous" or something like that, a rebellious Roman slave seemed to fit my conception of where I was.
LAMB: Where were you working then?
WHEELER: Senate Budget Committee.
LAMB: What year?
WHEELER: In 1999. The chapter was -- the book was published with Spartacus as the pseudonym author. It didn`t cause much of a stir. It was one of those books I thought was important, but never got much above 50,000 on the Amazon, you know, book-selling count. And I started writing other stuff and using that pseudonym.
The staff director, who I talk about a little bit in the preface of that book, in the Budget Committee had a requirement for staff travel. You can go anywhere that`s related to your job. There`s two requirements. The committee is not going to pay for it. You need to find somebody else to pay for it. It has to also comply with Senate ethics rules. He was strict about that. And after you returned from your trip, you need to write a trip report, And you`re not going on any more trips until I have that trip report on my desk.
And I went to various Army facilities, and I would also send them questions in advance, so that they wouldn`t feel like I was engaged in some kind of gotcha exercise. And I would write reports on what I found. And a lot of these reports are pretty critical of problems and why they existed, and the decline of training, unreadiness of major combat units, performance deficiencies in aircraft. And Bill Hoagland, the staff director at the Budget Committee, and I knew that the Republican members and the Democratic members of the committee wouldn`t appreciate these reports being associated with the committee staff. And so I started using -- I started distributing them on the Internet through the help of some other friends and used the pseudonym. And you can now do a Google on Spartacus and find a bunch of stuff I`ve written.
LAMB: Did Senator Domenici fire you?
WHEELER: No. As my brother puts it, I was invited to resign, ultimately. He told the New Mexico newspapers he fired me. This was after I wrote an essay in January, 2002. It caused a bit of a stir, and the senator complained about it. When it became known who Spartacus was, I asked to speak to Senator Domenici. We met. I explained to him what happened. He said he wanted to think about it. I offered to resign. The next thing I knew, a day or two later, a colleague handed me a New Mexico newspaper. I forget the name of the paper.
LAMB: "Albuquerque Journal"?
WHEELER: Yes -- saying something like, Domenici fires staffer for writing an essay. And I started communicating with the senator through his staff, and I basically said to him, We can make this easy or we can make this hard. If you want to fire me, that`s your right. But there`s -- I have lots of reporters calling me now because of this, and I would prefer the option to resign. But it can be -- this can be hard or this can be easy for you, Senator.
And he reluctantly, I think, decided to let me resign. He called me up one morning in my office, and it was a jovial conversation. He said -- he started the conversation saying, If I had wanted to fire you, I would have told you first. And we had a friendly, short conversation, and I made it clear to him I`ll resign promptly and I will not encourage newspaper articles about what happened. And I left in June, 2002. And then I started up with the Center for Defense Information in September and started writing that book September, 2002.
LAMB: A couple of things. When I read your book, I kept saying after every chapter -- and you can correct me if I`m wrong, Boy, this guy is angry. And then secondly, what is the Naval Institute Press doing publishing this book?
(LAUGHTER)
WHEELER: You thought I was angry, you should have seen the first draft. One of the exercises I go through in writing that was a toning-down exercise, taking out the nasty adjectives and trying to relate facts and then characterize them in a way I thought appropriate without getting -- without engaging in the kind of nastiness that we see an awful lot of in politics today. Some of that stuff is harsh in there, but I think it`s appropriate.
LAMB: Let me stop you there. Give us an example of one of the harsher things that you do in this book.
WHEELER: Calling Senator John McCain an enabler of pork.
LAMB: An enabler of pork?
WHEELER: Uh-huh.
LAMB: Actually, after this morning -- this is being recorded in late September, but I got on the Web site of Senator McCain and got a statement from him on September the 20th. And I just -- I wanted to read it to you because I thought maybe it would give you a chance to comment on it. It says -- this is about -- He says, "Mr. President, I support passage of fiscal year 2005 Military Construction Appropriations Act. This bill provides $10 billion in funding for important military construction. Amazingly, this report contains only 35 earmarks, totaling $44.7 million, which is significantly less than the approximately $80 million in unauthorized earmarks contained in last year`s appropriations bill."
He goes on to call it a clean bill. He congratulates the chairman, Senator Hutchinson, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and Senator Feinstein, the ranking member of the subcommittee, on and on. And he says it`s $44.7 million, down from $80 million. What do you hear -- what are all the things we`re hearing here, earmarks, the Military Construction Appropriations Act, and Senator McCain congratulating them.
WHEELER: We can talk about it at some point. He conveys the impression that things are getting better as far as pork and congressional defense authorizations and appropriations bills. That`s not correct. He counted himself $8.9 billion in the DoD appropriations bill for the other 95 percent of the Defense Department, beyond the military construction budget. That`s a world record. That`s the most they`ve ever jammed into a DoD appropriations -- Department of Defense appropriations bill. And that`s his count.
LAMB: That`s $80 billion?
WHEELER: No, no, $8.9 billion.
LAMB: I`m sorry. All right. But let me stop -- define what pork is.
WHEELER: The public understanding of pork is bad stuff that Congress stuffs into bills, including defense appropriations bills and authorizations bills. That public -- that`s a misunderstanding of the process in what pork really is. There might be some stuff of that $8.9 billion put into the DoD appropriations bill that was a good idea. There`s probably stuff that`s a bad idea. The point is, nobody knows.
The cost of it, short and long-term, hasn`t been assessed by the Congressional Budget Office. There`s been no truly objective analysis of whether that idea or that project or that parking garage, even, is really needed or whether it`s needed more in Alaska or in Rhode Island. There`s no independent assessment whether that thing is a good idea. Some of them are patently, you know, obviously, you know, lousy ideas. Section 81.13, stuffed in the back of the DoD appropriations bill, appropriates about $50 million for museums, a parade ground at a closed military base, stuff like that added. That might be acceptable in peacetime. In wartime, that`s not acceptable behavior, to my way of thinking.
LAMB: Well, take for instance (UNINTELLIGIBLE) lives way away from here. Lincoln, Nebraska -- I don`t know, pick your small town around the United States, and they`ve just seen an announcement in the newspaper that Senator X announces the building of a museum in the town, federal money. And they -- they don`t -- doesn`t say where it comes from, but here comes $25 million to build something. Isn`t that good for that community?
WHEELER: They`re not getting the whole story. They`re not getting the story of where that $25 million might be spent, if that museum weren`t being built. They`re not getting the story of what`s being tapped in the DoD budget to pay for that. And they`re not being informed about how good DoD pork is in really generating jobs.
One of the things I did for Senator Domenici to try to slow down the pork parade a little bit was to get a GAO study on just how many jobs these projects generated in New Mexico for him. The result was something of a shocker. Many of the projects that he was supporting and urging Senator Stevens and Senator Warner and Senator Thurmond to support, because it helped New Mexico, generated zero jobs in New Mexico. Some of them generated tiny numbers of jobs, 10, 15 jobs.
In some cases, the money was just passing through a corporate facility in New Mexico, on its way somewheres else. The big job generators were the military bases. Those were tens of thousands of people. But a lot of these other projects were tiny. The impression that members of Congress have is these are big deal job generators. If you want to generate jobs, do a roads project, don`t do a military contract.
LAMB: Go back to what you said about Senator McCain being a pork enabler.
WHEELER: Yes.
LAMB: I mean, he has a Web site, and it lists all the pork of the members, and he gets up in the Senate, as you say, and gives speeches and points fingers. Why is he an enabler, then?
WHEELER: Because he doesn`t do anything. He gives a great speech. He`s got a staffer who counts this stuff. They use consistent criteria. Their criteria are pretty modest, but they`re consistent, at least. So he has a track record in defense and other legislation as to what`s been going on for about -- oh, almost 10 years.
My problem is that after he gives his speech, he sits down, walks away and does nothing. He has the sense and the wisdom to appreciate that this stuff is a bad idea and it`s hurting our military. It`s not just a waste of money, it`s hurting the military. But then he -- in a parliamentary institution specifically designed to let the minority, even one senator, throw the body into legislative agony until he gets some kind of accommodation -- I`m not just talking about filibusters. There`s many things a member of Congress can do to inflict parliamentary pain on a body that is doing these kinds of things until he gets some form of accommodation. He consistently doesn`t do that.
In June, 2002, he came close. He started opposing some projects in a bill. He got whipped. The arguments against him were ludicrous, but they served the very good purpose of exposing just how flimsy the arguments were in favor of these ideas. But then he gave up. He said, I`m going to throw up various parliamentary hurdles to make this real painful for you guys, even though you`ve got the votes. He didn`t keep that promise. He walked away from it.
As a matter of fact, during that process, where he was going through this public exercise of doing the right thing and making threats about, I`m going to inflict this pain, a quiet process was going on that you could only see hints of if you were sitting in the chamber in the public gallery. But as a staffer, I was able to observe it much more closely and understand fully what was going on.
What was going on was that he was being -- he and his staff were being shown all of these amendments, and he was either approving or disapproving them, saying, I don`t -- you know, This one`s OK with me, this one`s not OK with me. In other words, while he was complaining about the process, he was participating in the process. He was culling out amendments that -- in that particular parliamentary situation were non-germane. They were in a filibuster -- excuse me -- they were in a cloture situation. Other times on other bills, he would call out amendments that transgressed the jurisdiction of the -- of his committee, the Commerce Committee. And those would get called out, but all the rest would continue.
LAMB: You`re using language that might be confusing. For instance, what`s non-germane mean?
WHEELER: When the -- when somebody threatens to filibuster to prolong proceedings simply by talking, the Senate can shut that up by going through a process of what`s called a cloture motion. If 60 senators approve that motion, debate is limited to 30 hours and amendments can only be germane. What that means, that the amendment can only address a subject matter already in the bill.
And in that particular situation, in July, 2002, McCain had the good sense to ask the parliamentarian, Is this amendment germane, when a porky, non-germane amendment was being proposed. And the parliamentarian is a staffer who makes these kinds of official adjudications, and so they were calling out the amendments that added pork to new subject matters to the bill. The ones that were adding pork in old subject matters of the bill proceeded.
LAMB: All right. You never have been to Washington. You`re interested in how your money is being spent. You`re watching C-Span`s coverage of the Senate and the House. What are they not seeing? And how if -- you`re watching and they`re not seeing -- how can they find out, for instance, about pork items?
WHEELER: Yes. It`s -- what C-Span does I think is very important. In the `80s, there was a lot of debate in Congress about whether it would make things worse or better to have the proceedings televised. And in a sense, it made things worse because there`s lots more sort of posturing and a lot less debate than there used to be.
But watching the floor proceedings is a great place to start. You can see Senator McCain give his speech detailing these items and characterize them, I think, you know, properly. Then you`ll see what doesn`t happen. You`ll see him sit down. Nobody else engages him. Nobody else says, Well, my -- you know, my amendment is too a good idea, and here`s why. They pass over it and move on to the next senator who`s got a prepared speech and wants to read it off.
So in a sense, you`ve got to listen to what is being said and then pay attention to what`s not being said. Even if you`re not, you know, skilled in all this complex parliamentary gobbledygook, if you see a member say something is a terrible idea and something should be done about it and then sit down and walk away, you`re seeing what you understand as somebody who`s declaring themselves, saying it`s unacceptable, and then doing nothing about it.
LAMB: Is it possible to get a list, as the years go on, of where the pork is? And how soon can you get it after it`s passed?
WHEELER: Best place to go is John McCain`s Web site. They stopped listing the speeches on older bills, but you can go there and get his speeches on this year or last year`s and the year before`s various bills, defense and otherwise. And go to the "pork busters" box on the upper right-hand corner of his Web site and read on. You`ll see in some of those speeches long lists, page after page of the several hundred items in a bill that nobody really knows what they are, but they`re being added because some member wants them.
LAMB: Do the members, when they vote on the floor of the Senate, know they`re voting on all these?
WHEELER: No. They`re adopted by a voice vote, without members being recorded one way or the other. A voice vote is -- there could be five members in the chamber, and the presiding officer says, Those in favor, say aye, and you hear a mumble, And those opposed say no, and you hear a low -- you hear silence or you know, one or two saying, you know, no. And that`s it. They`re not described. They`re certainly not debated.
My experience is that members who have their own amendments, even their staff often don`t fully comprehend what their -- what their thing is. You`ll see letters that the members send to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and in the case of military pork, the authorization committee chairman, Warner and ranking member Senator Levin. And these letters will go on for pages and pages, and they`ll have 20, 50 to 100 items in them, each one described in a paragraph maybe a third or half a page long. Those descriptions are usually scripted by the manufacturer or the Defense Department project manager, who`s stuffing it into the budget behind the secretary of defense`s back.
Not all staffers even understand what these things really are. The vast majority don`t understand the arguments against the item. They don`t call up CBO or CRS or GAO, where there`s...
LAMB: Stop. CBO?
WHEELER: I`m sorry. Congressional Budget Office. They can estimate the cost of a project.
LAMB: Works for Congress?
WHEELER: They`re Congress`s Guard`s official budget office.
LAMB: CRS?
WHEELER: Congressional Research Service. They`re quite non-political. There are experts up there on tactical aviation, on naval systems, on war powers legislation.
LAMB: And you tell us that there are what, 700 people that do that?
WHEELER: Yes. About -- who are specifically tasked to those -- that job of helping members of Congress understand legislation.
LAMB: And you worked for GAO, and you said it`s -- you criticize them, saying there`s too much careerism in GAO.
WHEELER: Yes.
LAMB: That`s the General Accounting Office. What does that mean? Who are they? How many people there?
WHEELER: I worked there for nine years. When I started there, there were about 5,000 GAO employees. Congress, when it decided to reduce staff in `92, `93, `94, went through an exercise where GAO absorbed most of those cuts, and it went down to about 3,200.
My experience in GAO is that when you pick up a GAO report, you don`t know what you have. You need to look carefully not at the content of the report, but at the section that describes their methodology. If their description of the methodology for their study is about page long and basically says, Senator or Congressman X asked us to do this, we went to the following places, we started on this date, we ended on this date, we spoke to these officials, and that was our methodology, my advice is to fold it up, put it on the table and go read something else.
LAMB: Why?
WHEELER: Because they basically went out and, in the case of Defense Department issues, spoke to project managers and collected documents. The documents they got were the ones that DoD permitted them to have. GAO has got statutory authority to get any document it pleases, and they had the ability to legally demand the documents. In Defense Department subjects, that almost never happens.
The division I worked for is not the defense division, it was the program evaluation methodology division. We had a small defense group of about half a dozen people. And when we had problems on documents, our leadership, our managers permitted us to get surly with the Department of Defense and say, We want these documents, and we`re not going to go away until you give them to us.
That`s not the ethic in the rest of the building. The ethic in the rest of the building, when I was there, was, We want to have a good relationship with the agency. And if we get surly with them, if we ask for things they don`t want to give us, we won`t have a good relationship with them. And they`ll give us even less. So we want to cooperate with them.
LAMB: Well, help me out here. The -- David Walker, who runs that organization, a 15-year appointment. They basically can`t fire him.
WHEELER: Right.
LAMB: Why would they care? I mean, they`ve got independence.
WHEELER: I left just before he came. That was about -- about eight years ago. The people I know who are still there tell me that things haven`t changed very much. But I can speak best to the period when I was there. And the reports I see coming out on defense subjects really haven`t changed. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. Some of them are thorough and comprehensive and look like somebody did some pretty good work. Sometimes, they`re basically what smart program managers told them, giving them a few bones, making them think they`ve cracked the case. And that`s the report.
LAMB: What`s -- but underlying all of your book is something -- and I want to get to -- is there fear involved in this? Is there money involved in all this? What is motivating people -- you say -- I`ll read -- "America`s constitutional checks and balances, the safeguards placed to protect liberty, to promote good government and to provide for and maintain American armed forces are failing. They are failing because today`s politicians want them to, and too many in the press and electorate seem OK with that."
WHEELER: Right.
LAMB: Why would politicians want the checks and balances to fail?
WHEELER: They can look better that way.
LAMB: Why do they want to -- I don`t -- (UNINTELLIGIBLE) pressing you, but why do they want to look better?
WHEELER: I think it boils down to a sense of self. It expresses itself in lots of ways -- careerism, seeking political advantage at every opportunity, looking for the next step in your career, the next way that you could become more important and more influential, and...
LAMB: To what end?
WHEELER: To the end of self-advancement.
LAMB: Did you ever feel that way in your 31 years working for four senators and the GAO?
WHEELER: Yes, lots of times. The ethic of, "I can`t do that, even though I acknowledge it`s the right thing to do, because circumstances aren`t good, it`ll be too tough, they`ll give me hell, I understand what you`re saying, I understand that if things were better, we should be doing this, but we`re not going to do it."
LAMB: You know, this book, as I said earlier, is published by the Naval Institute Press. And the reason I mention that is because in the back of the book, it says, "It`s the book-publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Institute, a private non-profit membership society, and it started at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland."
Why would the U.S. Naval Institute Press want you to air all this dirty linen?
WHEELER: I can`t answer for them. My understanding is that I talk in that book about how Congress operates, in some respects, how the Defense Department operates and how GAO operates and what`s going on beneath the surface, beneath the way American journalism describes Congress. I think I talk about nagging doubts that a lot of people, voters, people politically interested, have about what`s going on but haven`t found an explanation for and haven`t seen described at the level I try to describe them.
If I were a journalist or a professor teaching political science in a college or university, there`s no way I could have written that book. I think it`s -- I would like to think it`s more than a kiss-and-tell book. I think I try to describe the processes and what`s going on beneath the surface that they don`t want you to know about.
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