Miami Herald

 Trim spending, use savings on national security

   
By Lawrence J. Korb       
   

In a development that could signal the faint beginning of an enlightened shift in federal government spending, the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee voted to transfer $9 billion from the Pentagon budget to education, health and law enforcement accounts.

It took real courage for senators to approve this transfer in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was brave not because the money cut would affect the war effort in any way. In fact, the Iraq and Afghan wars are not funded by the annual defense budget but by supplemental appropriations.

No, what's impressive is the backbone that senators mustered to fend off defense contractor lobbyists who surely waged a frightening offensive to stop the sensible defense cuts.

And then there's the other force that senators overcame: the concern that by trimming defense spending, they would be quickly labeled ''weak on defense,'' ''unpatriotic'' or even un-American, leaving them vulnerable in their next election campaigns.

This is perhaps the most persistent and frustrating problem faced by members of Congress, especially Democrats, who want to scrutinize the regular Pentagon budget carefully: overcoming the fear that their routine oversight might somehow create the perception that they are ignorant of the threats our nation faces and therefore unfit to serve in Congress.

For all these reasons and more, the majority of senators on the Appropriations Committee deserve our thanks.

But they also deserve our support because there's trouble ahead. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the ranking Democrat on the committee, expects that the modest defense trim won't survive the House-Senate conference committee, where the Bush administration will be weighing in.

Already, the White House has threatened a veto if Congress cuts more from the defense budget than the $4 billion shaved by the House.

The administration's resistance to Pentagon cuts is senseless.

Even under the Senate's proposed trim, the Pentagon budget would still rise by almost 4 percent to more than $450 billion. This is a significant boost against the backdrop of the cuts facing other federal departments.

Furthermore, the $9 billion cut by senators represents only a fraction of the tax dollars currently squandered by the Pentagon, which continues to spend tens of billions each year developing obsolete Cold War weapons systems such as the $350 million F/A-22 Fighter or the $3 billion DDG-1000 Destroyer. These weapons are of no use to the men and women in the military in waging the war on terrorism.

The Pentagon continues to pour money into weapon systems such as the V-22 Osprey or the $500 million C-130J, which do not work. They are still spending $20 billion to maintain 10,000 strategic nuclear weapons 15 years after the end of the Cold War, as well as $11 billion deploying an untested National Missile Defense System. On top of all of this, Congress has allocated an additional $9 billion on nearly 3,000 congressional earmarks for programs the Pentagon did not request.

It's hard to find a serious political analyst in Washington who disagrees that the Pentagon is larded with tens of billions of dollars of waste, including money still being spent on Cold War weapons. It's an open secret. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calculates that the department wastes $20 billion.

Yet, Congress and the president do nothing about it -- even today, as record deficits soar and the budgets of so many other departments face cuts. By making the reductions discussed above several times the $9 billion could easily by transferred out of the Pentagon to help deal with those problems or others. That's why it's so encouraging to see the Senate Appropriations Committee take action.

But it will be up to all of us who care about national security and fiscal responsibility to shine the public spotlight on the upcoming House-Senate negotiations over the Appropriations budget, to ensure that the Pentagon cuts are retained and the savings are spent on programs that will benefit our broader national security.

Lawrence J. Korb, former assistant secretary of defense under President

Ronald Reagan, is on the military advisory board of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities.