Congress: Having Your Cake

Republicans seized on President Bill Clinton's mid-April request to fund the war in Kosovo as an opportunity to fatten the Pentagon budget–and what started out as a $6 billion request for Kosovo eventually became a $10.9 billion package of goodies that included a pay raise for the troops, overseas military construction projects, and a huge increase in readiness accounts for such items as spare parts and repair facilities.

With the bill under intense scrutiny from the media and citizen watchdog groups, members shrewdly maneuvered to avoid charges that they had piled on the pork. Instead, they devised a measure that would score political points for the 2000 election while leaving porcine-sized spaces in the annual Pentagon spending bills that were soon to follow down the legislative track.

Ever since last fall, when congressional hawks managed to tip public opinion in favor of hiking military spending, the Pentagon budget has been steadily rising. Last September, after a spate of “readiness crisis” stories were circulated, Clinton asked for an extra $1.1 billion to cover shortages of spare parts and fund additional training. Congress promptly turned a $1 billion request into an $8.3 billion grab-bag of special-interest projects.

In February, Clinton submitted his fiscal year 2000 budget request to Congress. With an eye toward the next election, he boasted that he had added $12 billion to his one-year blueprint for Pentagon spending and $112 billion to his six-year plan. Not to be outdone, Republicans promptly raised the ante, adding another $8 billion to Clinton's Year 2000 request.

Then along came the war in Kosovo–another opportunity for Republicans to demonstrate that they supported a strong military. Even before the administration had submitted its formal Kosovo request in mid-April, House Speaker Denny Hastert had convened strategy meetings with key Republicans to decide how much they should add to the coming request. As House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young said, “There are so many needs in the military. This would be a great opportunity” (Congressional Quarterly, April 17, 1999).

Most of the bill would be declared “emergency spending”–meaning that it would not count against the tight budget ceilings in both the 1997 balanced budget agreement and the fiscal 2000 budget resolution. For example, if Congress decided to add a $1.8 billion package for military pay raises and retirement benefits to the supplemental bill, it would free up $1.8 billion in the fiscal 2000 defense bills for other programs or projects.

Yet with the opportunity came complications. The bill was under intense scrutiny from reporters, budget groups, and opponents of higher military spending who were eager to point an accusing finger if the bill were stuffed with home-state pork. And if the Republicans were too blatant they might present Clinton with an opportunity to veto the bill and enhance his image as a fiscal watchdog.

Moreover, not every Republican bought into the pile-it-on strategy. Many vigorously opposed U.S. involvement in the war in Kosovo, and they believed that adding billions to the bill would send the wrong message about U.S. intervention in the former Yugoslavia. One of these, Slade Gorton of Washington, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, argued: “I opposed getting into this adventure in the first place, and I don't see why I should signal my support for it by giving him [Clinton] more than he asked for” (Congressional Quarterly, May 1, 1999).

Other Republicans were delighted to dump more money on the Pentagon, but they wanted to cut domestic programs to pay for it. “I do favor offsets,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, although she added that “we're going to have a hard time offsetting it all” (Congressional Quarterly, April 17, 1999). Without compensating budget cuts, the money would have to be drawn from the surplus generated by the Social Security trust fund–at a time when Republicans said protecting Social Security was another key agenda item.

Faced with these competing pressures, House appropriators decided to play it safe. Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Lewis and ranking Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania proposed raising the $6 billion request to $12.9 billion. Yet their bill was remarkably free of provisions that would have raised hackles and produced negative media stories.

Murtha, who worked closely with his Republican counterpart to prepare the package (there was significant Democratic support for the measure), explained during his committee's April 29 consideration of the $12.9 billion package that “there is not one cent in here [spent on pork projects] that you can point to. … This bill is so clean I hardly hate to have any parentage of it.”

So what was the game of those adding almost $7 billion to the president's request? As the Appropriations Committee's ranking Democrat, David Obey of Wisconsin, argued on the House floor a few days later, “They [the Republicans] are jamming $3 billion of non-emergency items into this bill to make room for $3 billion worth of pork in the defense bill which will follow.”

Earlier, during the committee debate on the bill, Obey alleged more Republican hypocrisy. The day before the Appropriations Committee considered it, the House–in a series of three embarrassing votes for both the Republicans and the Clinton administration–refused either to endorse the U.S. air campaign in Kosovo or to force U.S. troops out of the war.

Said Obey: “I also, frankly, find it mind-boggling that some of the same members who yesterday voted against the [Kosovo] operation will today here now vote to more than double the amount of spending that the president has asked for. … I think that is spectacularly inconsistent, and that's the kindest thing I can think to say about it.”

Inconsistent or not, the House Appropriations Committee and the full House voted for the full funding proposed by the Republican leadership, rejecting efforts by Obey to cut it back. In the later House-Senate conference to produce a final bill, the $7 billion increase for the military was whittled down to $5 billion, for a final total of $10.9 billion. The bill was also tied to other “emergency” measures, including assistance to hurricane victims in Central America, tornado victims in Oklahoma and Kansas, and American farmers hurt by low prices. It also included a ban on the federal government receiving tobacco settlement funds, increased border enforcement, airport funding, Japanese reparations, a dormitory for House pages, and much more. The major controversies that slowed its progress involved three anti-environmental riders and a loan-guarantee program for steel producers.

Arizona Republican John McCain, a noted Senate anti-pork crusader, scrutinized the final product for unnecessary and unrequested projects and found “more than $1.2 billion in non-emergency, garden-variety, pork-barrel spending.” Yet almost all of the items he found objectionable were non-Pentagon-related, such as $26 million to compensate Dungeness crab fishermen in Alaska.

The Republican strategy worked; the Pentagon portion of the bill remained clean. But Obey's analysis was dead-on. At the same time that the supplemental was completing its tortuous path through Congress, House and Senate committees began work on the fiscal 2000 Pentagon money bills, gratefully accepting the new money to fund their pet projects. The Republican Party can enter the 2000 election year claiming it is the party of strong defense while it funds pork projects at the same time.