When the Senate voted on July 21, 2009 to strip funding out of the National Defense Authorization Act for additional F-22 fighters, there was an important element to the vote that did not receive the attention it deserved.  Like most advocates of "earmarks" in defense bills, the author of the effort to pay $1.75 billion for seven more F-22s, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), did not add any money to the bill to pay for the planes.  Instead, he secured reductions in other parts of the legislation ("offsets"), thereby not raising the bill's total spending. 

There was nothing new in this; using offsets is Congress' standard method to pay for earmarks in defense legislation.  For example, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved 426 earmarks costing $9 billion in its National Defense Authorization bill.[1]  The grand total authorized for all defense spending by the bill was $0.4 billion below the $680.2 billion President Obama had requested.  The entire $9 billion tab for pork was offset. 

It was the specific offsets that Chambliss selected to pay for his additional F-22s that are particularly interesting; they reveal the values of the congressional pork system.  It is also an element of the system that the press has mostly ignored.  

The offsets Chambliss selected were to reduce Army, Navy, Air Force and DOD-wide Operation and Maintenance (O&M) spending by $850 million.  The Military Personnel (military pay) account was also reduced by $400 million, and a false assumption was made that the recently enacted Weapon System Acquisition Reform Act would save $500 million across the boards in DOD in FY 2010. [2]  We focus here on the $850 million extracted out of the O&M account.

O&M is a huge and diverse account.  For 2010, President Obama requested $156.4 billion for it.  It pays for all civilian salaries in the Department of Defense (DOD), all military training and exercises, fuel for flying, steaming, and driving; food, most spare parts for weapons, all maintenance for weapons including depot maintenance and ship overhauls, and several major programs including the huge Defense Health Program.   In short, the O&M account is the operational lifeblood of our military forces; without it, the planes don't fly, the troops don't train, and the forces can't fight.

The O&M budget has constantly been under pressure.  As weapons become older, they require more maintenance, and cost.  Also, our new (more complex) weapons are virtually universally even more expensive to maintain than the aging ones they replace.[3]  In addition, the Defense Health Plan is on a trajectory of ever increasing per capita cost; Congress routinely increases civilian pay above the rates recommended by the Office of Management and the Budget, and training and operating costs are always climbing faster than the budget grows - thanks to the increased expense of operating both aging and ever more complex equipment.  One would expect substantial annual increases in the O&M budget.  Instead, only modest increases usually occur in executive branch budget requests.  Congress virtually always decreases them. 

There are forces in Congress, and the Pentagon, that seek to behave as miserly as possible with the O&M budget.  Always on the hunt for funds for the huge increase in the cost of new (more complex) weapons in the separate Procurement and Research and Development (R&D) accounts, program advocates often argue that "modernization" is being retarded by high operating costs and, therefore, the O&M budget must be squeezed to help pay for new acquisitions.  The result is to starve important readiness spending.  For example, in the 1970s, Air Force pilots were permitted 20-25 hours per month for air-to-air combat training, an amount then considered just adequate.  Today, F-22 pilots get barely 10-12 hours per month in the air; F-16 pilots get more, but only about 17-18 hours.  This has succinctly been called "the rising cost of lower readiness."[4]

Senator Chambliss' $850 million raid on the O&M budget to help buy seven more F-22s was a classic example of this behavior.  When the matter was debated on the Senate floor on July 13, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-MI), was as direct as he's ever been about the Chambliss funding mechanism.  Levin said -

The amendment also pays for these additional F-22s in the following ways: No. 1, it cuts operation and maintenance. No. 2, it cuts civilian pay funds that need to be available. No. 3, it also reduces the balances that have to be kept available for military personnel. And No. 4, it assumes that there are going to be near-term savings in fiscal year 2010 from the acquisition reform legislation that we recently adopted ...

Each of those places cannot afford those cuts. We are talking here about operations and maintenance. This is the readiness accounts of our Armed Forces. These are the pay accounts of our Armed Forces.

And a little later -

". . . readiness rates across the board have continued to suffer after several years in combat. Yet half of the reduction made by the amendment which added the F-22s was assessed against O&M Army. It is a dangerous thing to do. It is an unwise thing to do.[5]

The Chambliss effort offered a stark choice to the Senate: either spending for O&M, including training and maintenance, or more F-22s.  To their credit, the authors of the motion to undo Chambliss' readiness raid, Senators Levin and John McCain (R-AZ), made the choice clear in the text of their amendment and Levin orally pointed out the issue.[6]

However, the matter attracted little real attention in the Senate. The F-22 debate focused instead on other issues: whether more F-22s were or were not needed, whether Air Force officials truly did or did not want more F-22s, and the jobs the program brought to various states.  That the readiness raid did not attract significant attention was quite predictable - such raids are standard behavior in Congress, and almost no one ever complains about it.

Congress' four defense committees[7] routinely raid the O&M account to help pay for the pork in their bills.  They have been doing it for years.  This year, in addition to the $850 million Chambliss raid on O&M for F-22s, others in the Senate Armed Services Committee raided an additional $1.154 billion[8] out of O&M to help offset earmarks the committee distributed throughout the bill.[9] 

The Senate Armed Services Committee was hardly alone.  The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) added $2.26 billion for 502 earmarks, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.[10] They cut O&M by $1.962 billion to help foot the bill. 

The House Appropriations Committee, chaired by its aggressive earmarker, John Murtha (D-PA), cut its O&M account by a total of $2.9 billion[11] to help pay for 1,116 earmarks.[12]  Taxpayers for Common Sense measured the cost of these earmarks at $2.75 billion; the committee's $2.9 billion cut was counterbalanced by $646 million in adds, mostly earmarks, in the O&M account to make a total net reduction in O&M of $2.3 billion.[13] 

When I asked about the basis for the 2010 hits on the O&M account, congressional staff told me that the cuts were all quite justified.  Indeed, the military services were unable to "execute" (spend) the money and would "leave it on the table" at the end of the fiscal year if it were not scooped up and somehow used by Congress now.  Indeed,...