Hawks and hogs: why no one dares attack the waste in defense spending.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Column

SHORTLY AFTER THE midterm elections, as his fellow Republicans lay moaning on a row of hospital stretchers, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint made a decision: He wasn't going to stick earmarks for his state into any more spending bills. If some greedy constituent expected him to bring some pork back home, that was just tough. He was through with earmarking--with one caveat. "There should be some very limited earmarks in defense spending bills," the senator says.

South Carolina came out a winner in the last few defense packages, with $I02 million in the 2005 bill and $131 million in 2006. And that included items, such as "coastal cancer prevention" that are difficult to link with either of America's ongoing wars. What does DeMint think about them? "We've got a defense industry in South Carolina," he says. "We have contractors who are simply the best equipped to handle some of the programs in these bills."

Ask any one of DeMint's 99 colleagues if his or her state deserves a few defense-related earmarks, and you'll get a similar answer. In the House the answers will be more specific: South Carolina needs those military contracts, sure, but here in the 1st, or 2nd, or 3rd District we're especially good at building jet tanks and amino clips. Military spending is both massive and politically untouchable.

That fact poses a formidable challenge for anyone who wants to take a knife to government spending. In the wake of the slow-motion car wreck that was the Social Security reform debate, everyone agrees that cuts in entitlement spending are politically impossible in the short term. That means outlays amounting to 8.4 percent of the gross domestic product won't be touched. Anti-pork, anti-spending activists are more sanguine about their progress in slicing fat out of transportation and other nondefense appropriation bills. But they're the first to admit that far more money is wasted in defense bills--3.9 percent of GDP--than in the latest package of highway fix-ups. And that doesn't include the supplemental spending bills that during the last four years have funneled more than $300 billion into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, that spending is as untouchable as Social Security.

Part of the problem is outright pork, the kind of projects that legislators like DeMint have doggedly pursued, with occasional success, in nondefense discretionary spending. The final version of the 2006 Department of Defense appropriations bill, for example...