with earmarks and policy provisions the committee does not welcome.

But that's not what is happening this time around.  The Committee reported its bill on September 10.  Almost two weeks later, it remains undebated, languishing on the Senate Calendar.  Word has it among some Senate staff that the reason for the delay is to hold the final version of the bill until later in the month.  Then will be the end of the fiscal year, and because the Senate has not passed more than half of the twelve appropriations bills that fund the federal government, there will be a need for an "omnibus" bill to package them altogether and get them passed before the new fiscal year starts on October 1.  The DOD Appropriations bill is typically seen as a good vehicle for this mammoth legislation: very few in Congress are willing to tolerate being accused of opposing defense spending bills; incorporating the DOD bill into the Omnibus, let alone using it as the prime mover, helps to ensure passage. 

There are also rumors that the DOD Appropriations bill will become a legislative vehicle for other legislation, such as the imminently required bill to extend the debt limit of the entire federal government.  In other words, the DOD bill will be transformed into, or made part of, a measure for funding most of the federal government.  It will be "must pass" legislation.  It will also be veto proof.  Senator Inouye will have a clear path to including pretty much anything he wants in the DOD parts of this broader legislation.

The Mother Lode of the Pork System

Inouye's winning, or even losing, on the F-22, F-35, and VH-71 issues will not determine who wins or loses on the broader war over pork in defense spending.  There are other far more important issues about pork than the veto-bait programs that have attracted attention in the media.  It is those much more fundamental issues that will determine who is winning or losing the match on pork.  On those issues, Gates and the White House are not even putting up a fight.

Beyond the C-17s, the F-22s, the F-35 engine, and the helicopter, the Senate bill is filled with hundreds of small earmarks, the garden variety pork.  It is all paid for with a mechanism that runs counter to everything Gates has asserted to be his defense spending priority -- it's at the expense of military readiness to prepare for and fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As counted by Taxpayers for Commonsense, the SAC-D listed 777 earmarks for $2.6 billion in its committee report.  That tally does not include some additional pork: $1.7 billion for a DDG-51 destroyer to be built in Pascagoula, MS, home to the SAC-D's top Republican, Thad Cochran, and $2.5 billion for the ten C-17s mentioned above.  It also does not include some other expensive additions, and even some more lesser ones, peppered throughout the bill.

Far more troublesome is how all these earmarks are paid for. 

The total spending in the bill is $3.9 billion less than the $629.7 Obama and Gates requested.  The committee did not add money to the bill to pay for its billions of dollars for pork, it found offsets in other parts of the bill.  One of the accounts the committee raided most frequently to pay for the add-ons was the bill's "Operation and Maintenance" (O&M) account.   That account pays for - among many things - training, weapons maintenance, fuel, spare parts, food, etc.: all the things a military needs most in the midst of a war.  There is hardly any more meaningful budgetary expression for support for the wars than this account.

Nevertheless, and without a peep of objection from Gates and Obama, the Senator Inouye and the SAC-D cut the $156.4 billion O&M request by a net $2.4 billion - according to the tables in the committee's report.  In truth, the cuts to the readiness account are larger.  Inouye and the Defense Subcommittee peppered several O&M sub-accounts with at least 47 earmarks costing $163 million.   This, in effect, reduces the money available in the bill for real readiness by simply spending it elsewhere. 

Inflation and Other Scams

Inouye and the SAC-D also cut O&M with provisions not appearing in the O&M title of the bill but in the General Provisions title.  For example, Sec. 8091 in General Provisions reduced O&M across-the-boards by $294 million, based on completely unspecified and unexplained "revised economic assumptions." (Other titles were cut by an additional $577 million.) 

An inquiry to the committee revealed that the justification for this cut was a new estimate that future inflation would be lower than projected earlier, and, thus, the money could be cut with no reduction in purchasing power.  The rationale was completely specious: the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which are the data the committee is mandated to use, shows future inflation to be higher than previously expected. 

Specifically, CBO's economic forecast last March anticipated a .8 percent increase in the future GDP price index; this past August, CBO predicted a 1.1 percent increase.  If one seeks to trust economists' prediction for such future trends, as clearly the SAC-D purports to, instead of money being cut from the O&M budget, it should be added!

Section 8100 reduces Air Force O&M by $500 million, justified as "excess cash" in Working Capital Funds.  Working Capital Funds are simply amounts of money sloshing around inside the Pentagon's as one entity pays another for goods and services, such as maintenance and supplies.  Without the committee's releasing a competent study of whether such a huge amount of money is truly excess to needs, this reduction must be considered unsubstantiated.

There are also other sections in General Provisions that transfer or use money in the O&M budget from non-O&M purposes.  In each case, the committee failed to provide any meaningful explanation. 

The committee's whacking at the O&M budget is nauseating.  In-air Air Force and Navy pilot training hours for combat aircraft are at historic lows; training time in the Army, for example for tank crews, is lower today than during the low readiness Clinton years.  Units reporting for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have been publicly reported to be leaving the US with low readiness ratings.  In each service, the backlog for maintenance and repairs remains huge.  It is not as if the money could not be put to high priority use if it were left in the O&M budget.  Instead, however, something in excess of $3 billion was extracted out of the O&M budget -- for the purpose of offsetting (that is, paying for) pork.

Raiding Also War Spending

And, there's more. The SAC-D cut O&M also in the "Overseas Contingency Operations" (OCO) title of the bill that more directly funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The $81 billion request from Obama and Gates for O&M for US military operations in the wars was cut by $655 million, and another $1.715 billion was cut from the proposed military aid to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. 

The committee also added some goodies (major hardware spending) to the procurement account in the OCO title: $512 million for 9 F/A-18E/F aircraft, which are unlikely to be built in time to have an impact in the wars, and $1.2 billion for unrequested M-ATV armored vehicles. As with the base bill, the committee did not add money to the requested level of spending for these (and other) add-ons; they used offsets, including the cuts in US O&M and for allies to keep the total spending below the requested amount....