Army Awaits Emergency Aid as Senate Tacks Pet Projects to Bill

Two months ago, President Bush urged Congress to act quickly on an $82-billion emergency spending bill needed to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The House responded, passing the bill by mid-March. But in the Senate, lawmakers have been unable to resist the temptation to attach their favorite projects and causes to the legislation.

The result: A bill the Pentagon says it needs urgently has become bogged down in debate on the Senate floor and freighted with extraneous items.

Piggybacking pet projects onto must-pass measures is a time-honored tradition in Congress. But in this case, with a showdown looming in the Senate on judicial nominations that could stall much of its business, the tactic has proved especially appealing -- to the point that not even a military-related bill is immune.

Some senators note that they have not increased the president’s funding request -- in fact, they’ve decreased it, to about $80.6 billion. But congressional watchdog groups say money has been inappropriately shifted from some military and diplomatic purposes to projects such as fish hatcheries and waste water treatment plants.

Congress is “bent on bringing home the bacon, even if it has a negative impact on our troops,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.

So far, the Senate has cut $500 million from the president’s defense-related requests and $42 million from his $950-million request for tsunami relief for South Asian nations. It has added $269 million in domestic spending, and another $137 million in a category designated “other emergency appropriations.”

“It’s disgusting,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who regularly attacks colleagues for larding bills with what he and other critics term pork.

McCain said Congress owed it to U.S. troops to quickly approve the spending bill and keep it focused on military and diplomatic matters.

Many of the amendments to the measure are “particularly egregious because the name of this bill is the Supplemental Appropriations to fight war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” McCain said.

Jenny Manley, an aide to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the committee had done nothing that would harm U.S. soldiers on the front lines.

“The first priority of Chairman Cochran and the committee was to get funding for the troops,” Manley said. “Any amendments came as an afterthought and did not take money from the troops.”

An amendment sponsored by Cochran earmarked $35 million in the bill to pay for a wastewater treatment project in DeSoto County, Miss.

Watchdog groups have combed through the bill’s text and pronounced several projects as outside any reasonable definition of an emergency.

“It’s horrifying what we define as emergency spending,” said Keith Ashdown, policy analyst with the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. He warned that the House would not let itself be outdone by the Senate.

Ashdown said the Senate had opened a “Pandora’s Box for pork” in its version of the measure. When it comes time for the two chambers to craft a final product, he predicted House members would say: “The Senate got theirs, let’s get ours.”

A House Appropriations Committee staff member, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that House members were readying their own amendments that they would insist on including in the final measure.

“We wanted to keep the bill clean, but at the same time, if the Senate’s not going to live by that standard, we’re not going to disadvantage our chamber,” the staff member said.

The White House has criticized spending measures senators have attached to the bill.

“The administration has concerns with items that are unrelated to the funding of the global war on terror or to the Indian Ocean tsunami relief and reconstruction” effort, a White House statement said.

By the time the bill reached the Senate floor last week, it included three projects worth about $40 million, added by Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.). All involved the National Nuclear Security Administration, which has three sites in his state.

Chris Gallegos, Domenici’s press secretary, said the senator attached the measures because, “This bill was the vehicle moving through the Senate.”

A senior Senate Appropriations Committee staff member, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the process at work a bit more colorfully. “Once somebody finds a way to open up the door just a little bit, it becomes a big old ball, rolling downhill, gathering the dirt,” the staff member said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) sent out a news release saying that she had secured $34.3 million in the bill to “repair national forest roads and facilities in Southern California that were damaged by winter flooding.”

Feinstein noted that another $113 million in the bill had been set aside for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Watershed Protection program, and that $11 million of that would fund projects in Southern California.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had $500,000 designated for an oral history project at the University of Reno, another $500,000 for a desalination plant at the university and $4 million for the Fire Sciences Academy in Elk, Nev.

Tessa Hafen, Reid’s press secretary, defended the projects, saying the first two were mistakenly left out of last year’s budget and that the funds for the Fire Sciences Academy were appropriate because its instructors “do a lot of homeland security training and fire training, so Sen. Reid did feel that was important to include on this bill.”

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) secured $5 million to complete a fish hatchery at Fort Peck in his state, a project on which the federal government had spent $20 million.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said he included $42 million to build a new aircraft hangar at Fort Wainwright in his state because when the old one burned last year, it was too late for Congress to include replacement money in the Defense Department’s budget.

The bill has become a magnet for other issues. Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) insists on offering an amendment that would legalize the status of about half a million illegal farm workers.

Other senators have sought to attach amendments that would toughen U.S. actions against the Sudanese government for failing to stop genocide in Darfur.

If any of those measures were adopted, they would probably prolong negotiations between the House and Senate over the final bill.

Alarmed by the prospect of such delays, Army officials have begun to remind lawmakers that the Army needs the money by mid-May so that it can keep food, weapons and supplies flowing to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.