OUR VIEW: Robbing troops to pay for earmarks

This country would be much safer and more prosperous, with its core national interests better served, if the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were ended. A nation that is constantly at war cannot possibly avoid economic devastation. It’s time to declare define victory, achieve it, declare it, and get out.

While U.S troops are in the field, however, it is difficult to express just how utterly unconscionable it is for Congress to divert money requested for fuel, ammunition and training to earmarks requested by individual members of Congress for pet projects designed to enhance their reputations or buy votes.

But that is just what has happened in this country, where politicians are becoming more brazen by the day with their unapologetic, self-serving tactics.

Pork-barrel spending is hardly new in Washington. But Winslow Wheeler, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Defense Information, which conducted a study on this year’s defense budget, has made some alarming discoveries.

“In 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year.”

And they couldn’t have picked a worse time to do it, with our country mired in two seemingly intractable wars which have stretched our defense resources so thin we must hope and pray nothing goes wrong in the world.

Congress cut the administration’s request for operations and maintenance, or O&M, by a total of about $3 billion. Instead of spending for training, repairs, spare parts, supplies, weapons, ammunition and the like, it allocated $2.8 billion for 778 different projects designed to enhance individual legislators’ prestige, bring money to home districts or pay off campaign contributors.

Among the earmarks were $25 million for a World War II museum in New Orleans, $20 million to jump-start an “educational” institute to be named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, $20 million for a space surveillance system in Hawaii and $25 million for something called the Hawaii Federal Health Care Network, just to name a few.

Among the greediest porkers was Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. In all, Inouye inserted 35 earmarks worth more than $206 million. He was outdone by Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, of Mississippi, who sponsored 48 earmarks worth $216 million. Do these people have no shame?

It’s not as if raiding the O&M budget is without consequences. According to Mr. Wheeler, “Air Force and Navy combat pilots training to deploy are getting about half the flying hours they got at the end of the Vietnam War. Army tank crews get less in tank training today than they did during the low-readiness Clinton years.”

The Navy has been forced to curtail at-sea training and flying because of a shortfall in O&M funds. Less training probably will translate into more American casualties, and a reduced prospect for victory in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The House and Senate defense appropriations bills differ in some respects. That means a conference committee will have to reconcile the two versions, and that could be good news. That committee could and should remove the pork.

Don’t hold your breath. They’re likely to concern themselves more with the political interests of their colleagues than with the interests of far away soldiers who are conveniently out of sight and out of mind.