Conn. Delegation Secures Extra $116.5 Million in Defense Bill: Still Not Enough to Save Jobs at Sikorsky
By Andrew Kosow
WASHINGTON, Dec.11, 2002–Have you ever complained that it is too hard to balance your checkbook? That your 2.4 children want stuff that your $600-aweek paycheck can’t possibly cover?
Now imagine you have 535 children braying at you, whining that your estimated annual; income of $2 trillion is woefully inadequate and suggesting that it would be a good idea to access your $5.95 trillion credit line to keep everyone happy…or else.
Welcome to the federal government’s appropriations process.
Behind the scenes, members of Congress are jockeying and trading to get the most from the federal teat. Critics of the process derisively call it pork-barrel spending (bringing home the bacon, get it?), while those that benefit from federal earmarks say they are worthy, cost-effective projects that are good for the red, white and blue.
A case in point: the small sum of $116.5 million added to this year’s colossal $393.1 billion defense appropriation for seven extra UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, built in Connecticut by Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. and championed by the Connecticut congressional delegation during the budget process.
Each year, there are literally thousands of appropriation decisions like this one, to spend the government’s money on the additional Black Hawks instead of other, perhaps more needed, projects, military or otherwise.
An examination of attitudes on all sides of the Black Hawk issue should help provide a snapshot of the budget fights that occur regularly on Capitol Hill, including, perhaps, a picture of an old Pentagon ploy of asking for less than it really wants and counting on Congress to make up the difference.
Pork or Not?
Pork is definitely not the other white meat in Washington.
Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a watchdog group, estimates that about $8.8 billion in this year’s defense budget is what it calls pork-barrel spending and that the 13 appropriation bills combined will have $20.1 billion in pork spending (Only two of the 13, of which one is the defense bill, have passed). One main criterion the group uses to classify a project as pork is whether the money earmarked by Congress is substantially larger than what the president or the relevantdepartment has requested.
The relatively small appropriation championed by Connecticut politicians for the Sikorsky-built helicopters does at first whiff smell a lot like bacon.
But maybe not.
With a war on terror under way and a possible invasion of Iraq looming, an extra seven helicopters does not seem to be a big deal.
Except that the Pentagon didn’t ask for them.
In the fiscal 2003 budget, president Bush and the Pentagon requested only 12 UH-60 Black Hawks for the Army–but the final bill includes money for19.
The defense appropriations bill represents an increase of $45.9 billion in total defense spending over last year, and includes$269.9 million to produce 19 Black Hawks for the Army.
Some would argue that Connecticut’s congressional delegation were merely doing their job by taking care of their home state. Others call the money for the extra helicopters a blatant example of pork-barrel spending.
“How do they know more about what we need to fight a war than the Pentagon?” asked David Williams, CAGW’s vice president of policy. “The fact is that they don’t, and historically neither of these guys vote in the interest of taxpayers.” CAGW gives both Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) extremely low scores for limiting government waste.
Because Lieberman is the chairman of the Airland Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee – a post he will relinquish in January because Democrats lost control of the Senate- he has been in a powerful position to influence defense spending priorities. Many experts, however, defended Lieberman against the notion that he would exercise that power to help Connecticut at the expense of national defense.
“Joseph Lieberman is a real intellectual leader on defense,” said Steven Kosiak, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent, nonprofit public policy research institute established to promote innovative thinking about defense planning. “He is not focused solely on constituent issues but sees the big picture.”
Many experts, asked to comment on this issue, could not, interestingly, even fathom what the fuss was about.
“Lieberman is not particularly egregious,” said Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “He’s pretty much like every congressman.”
“He is merely protecting his constituents,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense budget expert who is also at Brookings.
In other words, it’s business as usual.
As the late Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Ill.) said, “A billion here and a billion there and soon you are talking about real money.”
“People have to understand that it is more than this particular $116.5 million,” CAGW’s Williams said. “It has a ripple effect, and then other members say, ‘What about me? I want something too.’ ”
So, is there a justification for spending this extra money?
According to the defense appropriations bill, “Two UH-60L aircraft are available only for the Army Reserve. Of the additional aircraft, three shall be HH-60L Medical Evacuation (MEDEVAC) models available only for units of the Army National Guard, and two aircraft shall be UH-60L models available only for units of the Army National Guard.”
The National Guard and Reserves? Are they that important in a time of war?
As it turns out, yes, very.
“We can’t deploy anywhere without the National Guard being deployed,” said Jack Spencer, a defense expert at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington.
It seems pretty straightforward that the bill is earmarking the helicopters for an under-funded part of the military–but according to Fred Downey, a legislative aide to Lieberman, the Guard and Reserves might not actually get the new Black Hawks promised to them.
“The newest Black Hawks might go to frontline units and their Black Hawks would then be rotated back to the Guard,” Downey said. The intent of the appropriation, however, definitely was to “shore up the war-fighting shortfall in the National Guard and Reserves,” he added.
“The National Guard is the forgotten step-child of the military,” said Singer of the Brookings Institution. “They are forgotten when it comes to funding.”
“There is are more needs than resources available,” Downey said. “So the Pentagon prioritizes.” He went on to say that it usually counts on Congress to finance the shortfalls at the National Guard and Reserves. Requests to speak with the National Guard were not answered.
Some critics say, however, that this explanation is just a cynical ploy to blame the appropriations process in general for the government’s high spending levels.
“The Pentagon will deliberately underfund stuff they know has support on the Hill so they can stay within the spending parameters set by the [White House] Office of Management and Budget,” an official at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-profit, non-partisan budget watchdog group, said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They know the Hill will restore [the funding]. There is very little purity in this process.”
“The Pentagon knows Black Hawks have tremendous support and that Lieberman is influential,” said Thomas Donnelly, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank here. “But the fact is that Lieberman can only authorize the funding. He is not on the Appropriations Committee.”
Connecticut and Defense
It is very difficult to assess exactly how much Connecticut will benefit from spending in this defense bill because much of the military equipment is only partially built in Connecticut– but the benefits clearly are substantial. For example, $279.2 million is allocated for one E-8C Joint Stars aircraft whose highly sophisticated radar is manufactured at Northrop Grumman’s Norden facility in Norwalk. Other Connecticut companies, such as Pratt & Whitney (like Sikorsky, a United Technologies Corp. subsidiary) in East Hartford and General Dymanics Corp.’s Electric Boat of Groton, also secured many lucrative contracts.
In 2001, Connecticut ranked 10th in the nation in Department of Defense contracts. The contracts accounted for $4.27 billion of the gross state product, according to the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD).
“That is truly amazing for such a small state,” said Jim Watson, a spokesman for the DECD. “We are up there with the likes of Texas and California.”
Fairfield County, according to the DECD, ranked first in the state in 2001 in defense contracts per capita.
Money and Politics
Another aspect of this story – albeit not critical in the final analysis – is campaign contributions.
Many times campaign contributions are the pressure that companies use to push politicians to act on their behalf. In a Washington Post op-ed article on Dec. 4, former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) described the pressure large donors can exert on politicians:
“Who, after all, can seriously contend that a $100,000 donation does not alter the way one thinks about – and quite possibly votes on – an issue. Donations from the tobacco industry to Republicans scuttled tobacco legislation, just as contributions from trial lawyers to Democrats stopped tort reform.”
United Technologies Corp. (UTC) was the second- largest donor to Lieberman in 2002, with $36,000 in campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan, non-profit campaign watchdog group. UTC also was a top donor to Dodd, with contributions of $29,200 in 2002.
The largest donor to Lieberman and the second-largest to Dodd was Citigroup. Sanford Weill, the chief executive officer of Citigroup, sits on the board of UTC and gave $2,000 – then the highest allowable personal contribution – to Lieberman in 2000 when he was running for re-election.
The kicker came earlier this month, when UTC’s Sikorsky subsidiary announced layoffs of about 250 workers.
“[We] worked hard to help Sikorsky and we expect management there to work just as hard to help its workers,” Lieberman said in a press release earlier this month. “I urge Sikorsky’s leadership to pursue alternate measures to maintain their bottom line while avoiding additional layoffs.”
Rep. Chris Shays (D-4th) was blunter. “This is a big disappointment,” he said in a telephone interview. “We have appropriated 34 new [Sikorsky] helicopters, and I understand that they don’t have the sales overseas, but this the third round of layoffs, and it hurts the community.”
A spokeswoman for Sikorsky confirmed that weak international sales were the reason for the layoffs. She added that the company was very grateful to the Connecticut congressional delegation.
Published in The Hour, in Connecticut.
