Passing the pork; the Pentagon's blueprint for lobbying Congress.

• Author: Rasor, Dina

PASSING THE PORK

THE PENTAGON'S BLUEPRINT FOR LOBBYING CONGRESS

In January 1983 the Pentagon submitted a budget of $239 billion to the Congress, an increase of 14 percent over the previous year. Because programs outside defense were being cut under "Reaganomics' and stories about Pentagon waste had begun to shock Congress and the public, there were many predictions that it was the Department of Defense's turn to endure some serious trimming.

The year before, Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense, told the Senate Budget Committee that there "was not one ounce of fat' in the defense budget. Congress appeared to be fed up with that unrealistic appraisal and ready to make some reforms and reduce the increase in the defense budget. However, then-Senator John Tower, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who opposed any reduction in the budget increase, knew how to silence the cries for any serious scaleback of the continual increase in the money flowing to the Pentagon.

Tower sent a letter in February 1983 to all of his colleagues in the Senate telling them he was under a lot of pressure to cut the increase in the defense budget and asking them to give him suggestions of things that should be cut from their own state. The senator understood the patronage "pork-barrel' system of the Pentagon budget well and knew that he would get few responses. He did receive a couple of responses from the hundred senators. Senators Charles Grassley and David Pryor rose to the challenge, but none of the well-known liberal critics of the defense budget did.

Senator Tower's exercise demonstrated the major problems in trying to keep the defense budget under control and in canceling weapons that don't work. Over the past 20 years, as the entitlement programs have taken more and more of the federal budget, the defense budget has become the best means of patronage spending. Members of Congress have become very protective of the large defense contractors in their states or districts, mainly because of the jobs these companies provide. They will work very hard to make sure that their companies and the products made in their state and district are well represented in the Pentagon budget.

I have often heard from officials inside the Defense Department that part of the problem of procurement is that the Congress forces companies and weapons on the Pentagon that it does not want. Yet I have also found that these same procurement people are more than willing to use this pork-barrel system to ensure funding of their own weapon program, no matter how badly it is performing. In this three-ring circus of defense contractors, the Pentagon, and Congress, each uses the others to help spread the money around, but each is quick to blame another when a scandal is uncovered.

I was fortunate to receive from a source probably one of the best-documented cases of how the pork-barrel circus works to the benefit of the parties involved but to the detriment of the taxpayer and national security. It was a computerized lobbying plan used by the Defense Department, Air Force, and Lockheed to force through another run of the notorious C-5 cargo plane. You may remember that in the late 1960s Ernie Fitzgerald testified that the C-5 program had run $2 billion over its budget; a year later he was fired for that testimony. I fell into the defense investigating business in 1980 when I investigated the C-5A wing fix for the National Taxpayers Union. Thus, it was hard to believe that Lockheed would be taken seriously in the fall of 1981 when it entered the competition for a new cargo plane to be called the C-X.

Son of C-5

Lockheed was offering an up-to-date version of the C-5, but the Air Force was looking for a smaller, more maneuverable cargo plane that could land on unimproved runways, would not take up as much space of the ground, and would still be able to carry outsized cargo such as tanks and heavy artillery. It appeared to me and to some of my contacts in the Pentagon that the Air Force was once again asking its cargo planes to...