14 February 2002
Panel Chairman Defends Congressional Earmarks for Defense Budget
(Rumsfeld's proposals for 2003 well received by committee) (670)
By Ralph Dannheisser
Washington File Congressional Correspondent
Washington -- Congress is concerned over a disdainful attitude
expressed by some Bush administration officials toward the
legislature's role in the budget process, the chairman of the House
Defense Appropriations Subcommittee has told Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld.
"It concerns us that some executive branch officials have recently
been making suggestions that congressional initiatives and specific
recommendations for funding in appropriations bills are unwarranted
intrusions in the budget process," Representative Jerry Lewis
(Republican California) said February 14 in opening a hearing at which
Rumsfeld was the main witness.
Rumsfeld acknowledged that "there is a wealth of accumulated knowledge
here on this committee," declaring that the Fiscal Year 2003 budget
request, now before Congress, demonstrates that "we are listening."
But at the same time, he observed that Congress had made changes to
2,022 individual programs and line items contained in the Defense
Department's Fiscal Year 2002 budget.
"Now, any one of these individual earmarks may be quite reasonable,
and many are made with the best intentions in mind," the secretary
said. But in the aggregate, he contended, they have a sizeable -- and
presumably negative -- effect on "the coherence of the programs."
The exchange reflected one of the few disagreements in a hearing on
the 2003 budget -- what Lewis characterized as "the most important
defense budget perhaps in our lifetime."
Rumsfeld, flanked at the witness table by Air Force General Richard
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Department
Comptroller Dov Zakheim, said the department is faced with three
simultaneous challenges: winning the worldwide war or terrorism;
making delayed investments in procurement, personnel and
modernization; and "transforming for the 21st Century."
"There are some who say this may be too much to ask -- that any one of
these three challenges is daunting enough, but that tackling all three
at once is impossible. It is not. We can do it," he said.
"And we must do it, because our adversaries are transforming,"
Rumsfeld continued. "They are studying how we were successfully
attacked, how we are responding, and how we may be vulnerable in the
future. We stand still at our peril," he warned.
Rumsfeld said the needed transformation effort revolves around six
goals: protecting the U.S. homeland and overseas bases; projecting and
sustaining power in distant theaters; protecting U.S. information
networks from attack; using information technology to coordinate
action by U.S. military forces; maintaining unhindered access to
space, free from enemy attack; and denying enemies sanctuary.
Apparently with Osama bin Ladin and his al-Qaida terrorist network in
mind, he said those enemies must be shown that "no corner of the world
is remote enough, no mountain high enough, no cave or bunker deep
enough, no SUV (sport utility vehicle) fast enough, to protect them
from our reach."
Support for the department's proposed $379,000 million budget was
widespread on the committee, which typically is highly solicitous of
such defense requests.
Lewis noted that the proposal represents "a much-needed increase of
$48,000 million over fiscal year 2002 levels.
"It is a good first step in providing the necessary resources to
continue the war against terrorism and shape the military to deal with
the new threats we face," he said.
But, seemingly signaling further congressional fine tuning, Lewis
warned it is "imperative that budgetary priority be assigned to those
systems that will enable our efforts to eradicate terrorism and
transform the military to succeed, rather than funding programs that
have nothing but bureaucratic inertia behind them."
Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the
panel, also was broadly supportive of the department's budget
proposal. "This is as good a budget as I've seen with the amount of
money available," he told Rumsfeld.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International
Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site:
http://usinfo.state.gov)
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