House OKs Defense Budget Despite Charges It Serves Special Interests : Military: Some complain that national security is sacrificed for special jobs projects.

The 1990 defense budget moved closer to final enactment Thursday as the House approved the $305-billion spending plan, despite complaints that it is more a special-interest jobs bill than a blueprint for national security.

The House voted for the compromise spending bill, 236 to 172, sending it to the Senate for final approval.

The relatively narrow margin of the vote indicated broad dissatisfaction with the bill. Many Republicans were unhappy that funding for the “Star Wars” anti-missile shield was $1.1 billion below the Administration’s request. Some Democrats complained that too much is being spent on nuclear weapons at a time when the United States and Soviet Union are negotiating reductions in their strategic arsenals.

And members of both parties groused that parochial concerns about jobs overrode more pressing national priorities.

Rep. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) complained that “any relationship between national security and the defense authorization bill is purely coincidental.”

He and other lawmakers complained that House members funded costly weapons programs such as the F-14D fighter plane and the V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft despite efforts by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to kill them as unneeded and too expensive.

New York lawmakers succeeded in winning $1.6-billion funding for 18 F-14 Tomcats, which are built by Grumman Corp. on Long Island. Representatives from Pennsylvania and Texas won a reprieve for the threatened V-22, persuading their colleagues to approve $255 million to continue development of the unusual aircraft, a product of Bell Helicopter Textron Inc., and Boeing Co.

“The Congress of the United States turned the defense authorization bill into a jobs bill and rejected all the program terminations . . . except for a smattering that add up to pennies,” Kasich said. “It’s a jobs authorization, a pork authorization, rather than a defense security authorization bill.”

Rep. Larry J. Hopkins (R-Ky.) called the bill “a serious indictment of the congressional budgeting process, a process so throughly corrupted by parochial interests that the principal goal, providing for the national defense, has been ignored. What weapons we buy and where they’re built has become more important than whether they’re truly needed and fit within an overall defense framework.”

Meanwhile, Cheney warned Thursday that the defense budget could suffer damaging cuts if Congress fails to agree on measures to reduce the federal deficit.

He said in a television interview that if he is forced to make the deep cuts over the next few months “you could forget about negotiating from a reasonable position of strength” with the Soviets.

The defense secretary was referring to about $16 billion in across-the-board federal spending cuts, called a sequestration, that automatically went into effect Oct. 16 under the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law.

While the sequestration still could be lifted if a deficit-reduction bill is approved by Congress and signed by Bush, the White House has indicated that it is willing to live with the automatic cuts all year.

If the automatic cuts go into effect, the spending total just passed by the House would be reduced by $8 billion, the Defense Department’s share of the Gramm-Rudman cuts.

Cheney said he hopes “that’s not going to happen” because he would have to reduce military forces by 173,000 men and women and cut 4.3% from every other account.

The defense spending bill approved by the House Thursday authorizes a variety of Pentagon programs for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1.

Later in the day, House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on a $288-billion military spending bill for fiscal 1990 that largely tracks the defense authorization bill on the major strategic weapons, lawmakers and congressional sources told the Associated Press.

The legislation passed by the House marks the fifth straight year that the Pentagon’s budget has fallen in inflation-adjusted dollars. It is the first to cut spending for “Star Wars,” to $3.8 billion, from last year’s $4.1 billion.

The bill authorizes construction of two B-2 Stealth bombers in 1990 and five in 1991. The Air Force hopes eventually to build 132 of the radar-eluding planes at a cost of about $530 million each.

Congress approved funds for both the rail-borne version of the 10-warhead MX missile and the truck-mounted single warhead Midgetman missile. The two programs got a total of $1.13 billion, $150 million less than requested, and the Pentagon can decide how it wants to divide the money between the two systems.

The bill includes a 3.6% pay raise for the 2.1 million members of the armed forces.