Tasty Pork in the Defense Bill
Wash Post on porkalicious defense bill working through the Senate with President Obama's blessing:
President Obama has repeatedly promised to fight "the special interests, contractors and entrenched lobbyists" that he says have distorted military priorities and bloated appropriations in the past. In August, he told a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that "if Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork, I will veto it."…
The bill, however, would add $1.7 billion for an extra destroyer the Defense Department did not request and $2.5 billion for 10 C-17 cargo planes it did not want, at the behest of lawmakers representing the states where those items would be built. Although the White House said the administration "strongly objects" to the extra C-17s and to the Senate's proposed shift of more than $3 billion from operations and maintenance accounts to projects the Pentagon did not request, no veto was threatened over those provisions.
The absence of such a threat provoked Winslow Wheeler, director of a military reform project at the Center for Defense Information, to describe Obama's stance as "too wimpy to impact behavior." Wheeler, who earlier criticized the House for approving a version of the bill that includes extra C-17 planes, $2.7 billion worth of earmarks and other projects that Gates dislikes, said that "as a long-time Senate staffer who has read these documents for years, my interpretation of it is that the House-Senate conference will listen politely . . . and then do as it pleases."