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CounterPunch
March 4,
2003
A Peek Inside the
Pentagon's Pork Factory
An Ever-Expaning Spending Machine
By WINSLOW T. WHEELER
Many people think "pork" in defense
bills is something Congress dreams up and adds over the protests
of Department of Defense (DoD) officials. Not so.
The thousands of dubious-sounding local
projects that end up in defense legislation most commonly result
from a rotating catchall that starts and ends with someone in
a suit or a uniform in DoD. Senators and representatives are
just the errand-boys.
I should know: During most of the last
30 years, I was involved in the Capitol Hill pork process, one
way or another, up to my eyeballs.
As the fiscal 2004 defense authorization
and appropriations bills wend their way through Congress, a look
inside the process may prove instructive. But parents of small
children are advised not to let their kids keep on reading. This
is not a subject for the very young or the squeamish.
This year, as always, the phones of congressional
defense staffers have been ringing since January. Most of the
calls are not about the war, or even complaints about jet noise
at the local Air Force base. It's the nice lobbyist from Boeing,
or the state university, or the local DoD lab, or some other
smiling supplicant, including some in uniform, who wants a piece
of the defense budget. If the nice lobbyist isn't from DoD, he
has probably been talking to contacts in DoD. He has some suggestions
for how the senator can help constituents and, of course, the
nice lobbyist.
If he is a regular on Capitol Hill, and
especially if he's wearing a uniform, then the nice lobbyist
may not need to do much more than say what he's after when he
contacts the senator's staff. If the supplicant is a professor
after a university research project, the cost might be only a
few million or so; if he's a general looking for a VIP transport
aircraft (a perennial favorite), the price could be tens of millions.
However, if the importuning one is a
newcomer, then he may need to come in and brief the staffer.
If the morsel being sought has significance, he may also have
to meet the boss.
Not to worry. If he gets into the senator's
office, the senator will be very accommodating after just a few
questions (unless the lobbyist really blows the presentation).
Of course, there is the odd request that
is so outrageous that it could be an embarrassment to any member
of Congress sponsoring it. Most Senate offices are quite wary
of people they sense will get them into trouble. They will escort
a detected loon or sleaze quickly, but politely, out the door,
at least most of the time.
Loons and slimeballs notwithstanding,
the number of requests that are turned down can absolutely, positively
be counted on the fingers of one hand. Far more proposed increases
to the budget are embraced than are rejected.
For fiscal 2003, I prepared, as I did
each year, a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the requests
my boss, Sen. Pete Domenici (R- N.M.) wanted to add to the defense
appropriations bill. It went on for 23 pages covering 88 items
before I left the job last June.
Each member then sends this "pork
list" to the chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee
with a very-repeat, very- respectful cover letter.
A few weeks pass. Then subcommittee staffers
hand out envelopes containing the fate of thousands of requests.
As staffers who helped write the pork lists anxiously go over
their results, the subcommittee staff explains that two factors
influenced how well senators did: 1) the availability of funds,
and 2) whether the senator did or did not vote for the committee's
last defense bill.
One staff director was often blunt. If
you helped us, we helped you, was his frequent message.
Before the envelopes are handed out,
though, the defense subcommittee staff has spent weeks communicating
with DoD project managers, deputy assistant secretaries, base
commanders, and regional and service commanders asking if they
want what is being requested.
If the DoD contact says no, the project
is pretty much a dead duck. If the answer is yes, then the project
only has to pass the test of how well behaved the sponsoring
senator has been in the eyes of the "old bulls" on
the Appropriations panel. It's very much the same story with
the "authorizers" on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Again, most pork is spending that someone
in DoD wanted to include in the original defense budget. Having
failed to pass muster in the official budget review, the DoD
sponsor, or his industry or university or contractor surrogate,
uses the back door in Congress to clutch onto the additional
money needed.
Getting a hold of the lucre depends on
the answer the Appropriations or Armed Services staffer hears
from the DoD manager the staffer has contacted about the project.
And, yes, the staffer may very well be
asking the same civilian bureaucrat, or uniformed "milicrat,"
who got the back-door process started by making, or provoking,
the original phone call or visit to the senator's office.
In DoD, there are more catches than just
No. 22.
It's a process that makes everybody happy:
The DoD manager finally gets the spending he wants, the nice
lobbyist has completed his mission, the "old bull"
senator gets to dispense goodies, the staffer gets to play power
broker, and the recipient senators broadcast how effective they've
been at bringing home the bacon, especially around election time.
Of course, the president has seen his
budget converted into an ever expanding money-spending machine.
And the defense secretary has been circumvented by his own bureaucracy,
which has wedged back into the budget all manner of stuff the
secretary thought he had killed.
Recent defense secretaries, though, including
the current one, seem to have no problem with this. Last year,
Donald Rumsfeld sat idly by as his own bureaucracy shredded his
defense budget. This year should be no exception.
Winslow T. Wheeler is a senior fellow at the Center
for Defense Information, where he is writing a book on
Congress and national security. Wheeler previously worked in
the Senate and the General Accounting Office.
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