The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Hard of Hearing: Why the House's Attempt to Save Defense Spending Might Flop

It was probably the most ballyhooed congressional hearing on defense for the year. As the monthly economic news continues to show poor job growth, and as the elections heat up, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, and defense contractor Lockheed-Martin saw a major opportunity to protect the Pentagon budget and their bottom line. On Wednesday, just as the House of Representatives was about to debate the 2013 Department of Defense Appropriations bill, McKeon held a big hearing with Lockheed and other industry representatives to explain why the American economy could not possibly stomach the $55 billion in defense cuts set to occur in January, as required by last summer's Budget Control Act and the failure of the congressional "Super Committee" to cut a broad budget deal.

To heighten fear of the so-called "sequester," McKeon and Lockheed have been arguing that an obscure piece of legislation called the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires contractors to send out notices of impending pink slips to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of defense industry workers. And because of what they maintain is the WARN Act's 60-day advance-notice requirement, those warnings would come just a few days before the November elections. The only possible rescue from the predictable panic among politicians, especially Democrats, would be to undo the $55 billion in automatic cuts to the defense budget and save the jobs. Or that's been the idea.

But leaving nothing to chance, the day before the hearing, the defense manufacturers trotted out yet another study arguing that the sequester would cost over a million jobs in defense and related work; former Vice President Richard Cheney was brought into Washington to chime in on how destructive the Pentagon budget cuts would be; Lockheed's testimony was leaked to the Washington Post to produce an article published the morning of the hearing to soften up any reluctant politicians; and press conferences abounded.

All the usual hot rhetoric was rebroadcast in excess. To supplement Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's memorable description of the sequester scenario as "doomsday," the president of the manufacturer's mouthpiece, the Aerospace Industries Association's Marion Blakey, called the alleged impending lay-offs "Armageddon." Describing his own hearing as "probably one of the most important hearings I can remember," McKeon chimed in with "catastrophic" (another Panetta term) and termed the Obama administration's purported lack of concern about this looming event a "cavernous silence."

I fully expected that these crude tactics would be effective and that the Democrats at the hearing would be stampeded into clamoring for the sequester to be repealed with little to no concession from the Republicans.

I was quite wrong: From the McKeon/Lockheed perspective, the hearing was a complete bust.

How the F-35 Nearly Doubled In Price (And Why You Didn't Know)

By WINSLOW WHEELER

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On June 14 - Flag Day, of all days - the Government Accountability Office released a new oversight report on the F-35: Joint Strike Fighter: DOD Actions Needed to Further Enhance Restructuring and Address Affordability Risks. As usual, it contained some important information on growing costs and other problems. Also as usual, the press covered the new report, albeit a bit sparsely.

Fresh bad news on the F-35 has apparently become so routine that the fundamental problems in the program are plowed right over. One gets the impression, especially from GAO's own title to its report, that we should expect the bad news, make some minor adjustments, and then move on. But a deeper dive into the report offers a more profound, and disturbing, bottom line.

Notorious for burying its more important findings in the body of a report—I know; I worked there for nearly a decade—GAO understates its own results on acquisition cost growth in its one-page summary, which, sadly, is probably what most read to get what they think is the bottom line.

In that one-page summary, GAO states the F-35 program now projects "costs of $395.7 billion, an increase of $117.2 billion (42 percent) from the prior 2007 baseline."  The much more complete story is in this table from the report:

The summary uses the wrong baseline.  As F-35 observers know and as the table shows, the cost documentation of the F-35 program started in 2001, not 2007.  There has been a lot more cost growth than the "$117.2 billion (42 percent)" stated.

No End in Sight to Squawking Over Impending Defense Sequestration

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

 

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Nearly $500 billion in automatic defense cuts, called sequestration, are coming to Washington, but many committees are continuing forward with budget proposals as if the sequestration monster they helped create has already been overcome. Some Members of Congress are putting on a show of dealing with the looming problem. Defense expert Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information at POGO, had some choice words in a piece on The Hill for those Members attempting to deal with sequestration.

That the Department of Defense must be defended from sequester is one of the few unifying beliefs in Washington, even if it is quite poorly informed. Maneuvering for the elections is more important to the actors in an elections spectacle. The Republicans want to label Democrats as “anti-defense,” idly standing by as the defense budget is cut, and the Democrats paint the Republicans as wantonly obstructionist. Both sides think they’ll leverage more votes in November by doing so, and are avidly sticking to their game plans.

Their opposing motivations resulted in typically dysfunctional legislation last week: an amendment to tell them something they already think they know, demanding a report from the executive branch that says the sequester means too many cuts too deep, administered in a mindless, automatic fashion. The only real purpose to be served is providing fodder for newly elevated bombast. Yet, the authors of the amendment preen themselves, play-acting that they secured a meaningful step forward.

Read more at The Hill's Congress Blog.

Andre Francisco is POGO's online producer

Follow @andrefrancisco

Think-Tanked: Old Wine in Dark Bottles

By WINSLOW WHEELER

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Two of Washington D.C.’s most prestigious and well-funded think tanks recently published reports advising Congress and the Defense Department on how — and how much — to cut from the Pentagon’s coffers after November’s election. It is highly significant that mainstream thinking has moved beyond the vapid hysteria of the “doomsday” comments made by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, to debate over how to manage the further, all-but-inevitable, cuts.

Unfortunately, that’s the only news coming out of these reports — the Center for a New American Security’s Sustainable Pre-eminence: Reforming the US Military at a Time of Strategic Change, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Planning for a Deep Defense Drawdown — Part I: A Proposed Methodological Approach. Their contents, truth be told, are a favored old vintage.

Such elixirs are frequently quaffed in Washington to provide pretend relief from the sobering demands of fixing a malfunctioning Pentagon and its budget. Purportedly recommending “deep” spending cuts, and how to reform a Pentagon increasingly seen by the public as disproportionately overfunded and poorly managed, both propose neither meaningful cuts nor significant change.

New Podcast: Winslow Wheeler on the Jet That Ate the Pentagon and Congress's Addiction to Defense Spending

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project.

By BRYAN RAHIJA

Several POGO staffers recently sat down with longtime defense analyst Winslow Wheeler, the director of the Straus Military Reform Project and latest addition to Team POGO, to discuss a range of defense issues—everything from the jet that ate the Pentagon to Congress's addiction to national security spending. Have a listen:

• Download the latest podcast
• Subscribe to POGO podcasts via RSS
• Subscribe to POGO podcasts via iTunes (and don't forget to leave us a rating)
• Previous podcasts
  

You can read Winslow's latest work here. 

Bryan Rahija edits POGO's blog.

Follow @bryanrahija

Photo by POGO's Pam Rutter.

A Peek at Pentagon Pork: A Taxpayers' Guide

WINSLOW WHEELER

This article originally appeared in TIME's Battleland.

The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) and the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee (sometimes called the HAC-D) have reported their separate defense bills to the House of Representatives (both bills purport to address both spending and policy). The House has already debated and passed the HASC's "National Defense Authorization Act" (NDAA); it will soon debate the defense appropriations bill. Let's check out what they’ve drafted and try to figure out which panel is the House’s reigning Pentagon pork king.

The press has covered both bills with multiple daily articles; the House debate, while truncated, got into all sorts of nuts and bolts, including amendments on labor practices in DOD contracting, military depot policy, and protection of sea otters in navy exercise areas, among many other things. In all, there were 141 amendments allowed for debate. That level of legislative and journalistic activity would suggest that the bill and its accompanying “committee report” were thoroughly scrubbed to make sure there were no slimy invertebrates hiding under rocks in the depths of the bill or its report.

Think no such thing.

The sea otters and other minutia addressed in amendments, for example, reflect the energy and thoroughness of lobbyists, not of congressional staff or others. Otherwise, some particularly odious elements of the HASC bill would hopefully have been challenged by one of the very few existing guardians of ethics and governance in the House. Had they or their staffs combed thoroughly through the bill and report they would have uncovered and, I hope, exposed that everlasting object of interest by Members of Congress: pork.

Surely, that’s impossible. Even if reluctantly, Congress reformed itself on pork. Right? Indeed, it says so right here on page 530:

The Jet That Ate the Pentagon

WINSLOW WHEELER

Cross-posted at Foreign Policy.

By WINSLOW WHEELER

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next--by their count the fifth--generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It's no secret, however, that the program--the most expensive in American history--is a calamity.

This month, we learned that the Pentagon has increased the price tag for the F-35 by another $289 million—just the latest in a long string of cost increases—and that the program is expected to account for a whopping 38 percent of Pentagon procurement for defense programs, assuming its cost will grow no more. Its many problems are acknowledged by its listing in proposals for Pentagon spending reductions by leaders from across the political spectrum, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and budget gurus such as former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget.

How bad is it? A review of the F-35's cost, schedule, and performance—three essential measures of any Pentagon program—shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.