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Defense Bill Passed: Soldiers Paying The Price?

by nanute | December 19, 2009 at 08:45 am

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This quote is from Matt Taibbi, journalist, provocateur and some would argue, a polemicist.I would posit that he is one of the few journalist out there still willing toreport the news and let the chips fall where they may.

What most people don’t understand about earmarks is that they are not achieved by simply adding to the top number for the whole federal budget. Earmarks have to come out of the approved number for that particular appropriations bill. So if you want a highway earmark, the money has to come out of some other highway program.

In the defense bill, it usually works like this: Congress sticks in a few extra airplanes or ships as a handout to this or that member, usually in exchange for his vote somewhere else on some other issue. To pay for those earmarks, the favored targets for cutting are usually two parts of the defense bill: Personnel (i.e. military pay) and Operations and Maintenance (which includes such things as body armor, equipment, food, training, and fuel). Those of you who wondered over the years how it could be that soldiers in Iraq could somehow be left without body armor, well, here’s your explanation. They usually took the armor off those kids in order to pay off some congressman with an extra helicopter or two.

It makes no difference which party is in control of the process. This way of doing business has been going on for years. You would think that deficit hawks, and support the troops members of both parties would be up in arms over this charade. When it comes to bringing home the beacon, all bets are off. Apparently.

Consider this: Critics of the process claim that there are at least 1,700 earmarks in this bill totaling 4.2 Billion Dollars. .( I say at least, because that is the amount that the Senate is willing to admit to.) Not included in the earmarks:

10 C-17s- 2.5Billion
9 F-18s - .5 Billion (In the War Funding part of the Bill.)
The GE Engine - 465 Million

Do the math. That's another 3Billon 465 Million dollars that has to be cut from somewhere else in the appropriations. This brings the grand total of cuts needed to 7.66 Billion Dollars. Where is it going to come from, you might ask?

$1.9 billion in gross reductions to the Military Personnel (pay) account based on the arbitrary justification that there was need for an “undistributed adjustment,” or in some cases “reimbursables.”
$2.1 billion in net reductions from the O&M account in the base bill; $1.4 billion of that reduction was based on phony justifications (indirectly based on some flimsy GAO analysis never made public), such as “historic underexecution.”
The House and Senate Appropriations Committees also raided the direct war fighting O&M account in Title IX of the bill by $1.5 billion.
Total O&M raids, thus, amount to $3.6 billion. source: GAO