In GOP, Concern Over Iraq Price Tag
Some Doubt Need For $20.3 Billion For Rebuilding
By Jonathan Weisman and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 26, 2003; Page A01
A new curriculum for training an Iraqi army for $164 million. Five hundred experts, at $200,000 each, to investigate crimes against humanity. A witness protection program for $200,000 per Iraqi participant. A computer study for the Iraqi postal service: $54 million.
Such numbers, buried in President Bush's $20.3 billion request for Iraq's reconstruction, have made some congressional Republicans nervous, even furious. Although the GOP leadership has tried to unite publicly around its president, cracks are beginning to show.
"President Bush should live up to his recent pledges to restrain spending, by . . . taking a strong stance that the new Iraq can and should pay for its own reconstruction," wrote Rep. Tom Feeney (Fla.), a freshman Republican, and Stephen Moore, a conservative economist, in an editorial for the National Review.
The discontent is relatively contained so far, said Jim Dyer, Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, but that is because few lawmakers have read the proposal's fine print. As more details seep out, he said, anger is sure to rise.
Those details include $100 million to build seven planned communities with a total of 3,258 houses, plus roads, an elementary school, two high schools, a clinic, a place of worship and a market for each; $10 million to finance 100 prison-building experts for six months, at $100,000 an expert; 40 garbage trucks at $50,000 each; $900 million to import petroleum products such as kerosene and diesel to a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves; and $20 million for a four-week business course, at $10,000 per pupil.
"If those are what the costs are, I'm glad Congress is asking questions," said Brian Reidl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "If the White House wants to be portrayed as spending tax dollars in Iraq as cost-effectively as they spend [money] anywhere else, they're going to have to explain this."
Already, the administration's request for $400 million to build two 4,000-bed prisons at $50,000 a bed has raised enough questions in Congress to force Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer to explain that cement must be imported to make concerete.
"We're not talking sanity here," Dyer said. "The world's second-largest oil country is importing oil, and a country full of concrete is importing concrete."
Republicans have grown nervous enough about Iraq that Vice President Cheney and White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten traveled to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet privately with the agitated ranks and go over the $87 billion emergency war spending request.
"What [lawmakers] really wanted them to do was carefully review it so they can justify to constituents why they voted for it," said a GOP aide who was at the meeting. "You've got to be able to go back home and explain why we need to do all this."
In several closed meetings this week, Republicans questioned why the administration is piling more spending atop an ever-expanding federal deficit. Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, plans to offer an amendment making the package a loan, which the White House adamantly opposes.
"The people of eastern Tennessee want to know why the $20.3 billion couldn't be repaid by the Iraqi people from the oil revenues," Wamp said.
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) insisted that the administration press nations such as France, Russia and Germany to forgive some of Iraq's $200 billion foreign debt, which Bremer conceded is now the United States's responsibility. "It's tough to make a case to give $20 billion outright," Flake said. "There are a lot of us who are still troubled."
Flake and other conservatives also want the administration to offset the reconstruction package with cuts in other areas.
Meanwhile at a House hearing yesterday, Democrats pressed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz about whether the administration plans to withdraw troops right before the 2004 presidential election. He said no decisions were being made on political grounds.
"These are national security decisions; they have to be made on that basis," he said. Wolfowitz said that doesn't mean that "we're not trying to, in fact, get more Iraqis on the front lines, get them dying for their country so fewer Americans have to."
It's the reconstruction spending, however, that is drawing some conservatives' ire. Moore, who heads the political action committee Club for Growth, called some of the aid request "frivolous" and much of it "preposterous." Pete Sepp, a spokesman for the conservative National Taxpayers Union, said Americans are being misled.
"Many members of the general public are being led to believe this money is just to turn the lights back on in Iraq," Sepp said. "Once word gets out about the nature of some of these projects, it will pose a real dilemma for a number of policymakers who believe U.S. foreign aid is already suffering from administrative problems as well as overambitious goals. These are the kinds of things that radio talk show hosts love to chew up and give to their listeners."
GOP pollster Robert Teeter hinted that congressional Republicans are right to be nervous -- not so much about the military campaign in Iraq, or even the rising U.S. casualties, but about the White House's spending request. Support for the war remains relatively high, he said, and if elected Republicans can frame the full $87 billion package as the amount it takes to support the troops, they will be fine.
But as soon as the discussion turns to the nuts and bolts of Iraq's reconstruction, the public's longstanding antipathy to foreign aid quickly surfaces, Teeter said.
Then, he said, the overwhelming sentiment is, "We need to take care of our own." It is up to Republicans to keep the conversation centered on the troops, while Democrats will try to focus on the reconstruction's spending details.
Some Democrats want to split the $87 billion bill into a $67 billion military spending measure for quick passage and a separate reconstruction measure. Republican leaders adamantly oppose this, saying the entire proposal is essential and cannot be picked apart.
"The package is a wartime supplemental [spending bill], directly tied to the security and the ultimate withdrawal of United States forces from the region," said White House budget office spokesman Trent Duffy. "It has to be viewed in that context."
Duffy dismissed as "preposterous" Democrats' assertions that the administration is willing to spend more on Iraqis than its own citizens. The federal government spends $5.9 billion on prisons each year, compared with the $510 million the administration wants for corrections in Iraq next year, he said. Domestic air and ground transportation consumes $64 billion, dwarfing the $753 million the White House wants for Iraq.
For conservatives pushing for less spending in the United States, such comparisons hold little value. It is not the dollar totals but the targets. "A $54 million study for their post office?" asked Dan Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation.
Some Republican aides say the numbers may be more defensible than they sound because the budget is not quite real. They suggest the administration has inflated costs, in part to avoid having to come back next year for a new emergency spending bill, and in part so they can skim some of the money for classified military efforts.
And many congressional Republicans quietly say they will never challenge the president's request in public. To do so, they say, would risk an intraparty rift that could endanger Bush's reelection efforts as well as their own.
Democrats, meanwhile, question how long the GOP can remain unified. "Republicans are losing confidence the president can commit these resources in a reasonable way," Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said.
Senate GOP leaders are rushing to bring the $87 billion request to a vote by the end of next week, prompting Democratic complaints that the measure is not being fully considered. Daschle questioned the need for haste, noting that Bremer told Democrats this week that the money will not be needed until January.
Staff writer Helen Dewar contributed to this report.
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