Bid to Bar Fund Transfer for Military Jobs Assailed : Defense: The Pentagon says Aspin’s opposition to the budget move would force layoffs of as many as 68,000 people in uniform.

Congress is gambling with tens of thousands of military careers in a game of brinkmanship over how to meet federal deficit reduction targets, Bush Administration officials charged Tuesday.

Defense Department officials criticized attempts by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) to deny a Pentagon request to divert funds to personnel from other department accounts in order to save military jobs.

Defense officials called Aspin’s plan “a really terrible idea” and said it would force the military to lay off as many as 68,000 officers and enlisted men before the end of the year, contrasted with 23,600 that the Pentagon proposes to trim.

“It’s really going to be nasty” if Aspin carries out his threat, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said. “It’s really going to be fire and brimstone.”

At issue is a Pentagon request to “re-program” $777 million in the department’s fiscal year 1990 budget.

The proposed diversion of funds from other military uses into Army, Navy and Air Force personnel accounts would allow the Pentagon to comply with spending reductions mandated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction law without making drastic military manpower cuts.

But Aspin, in a letter sent Monday to members of the Armed Services Committee, said he would ignore the Administration’s request.

The committee chairman accused the White House of welshing on a deal cut last year to meet the Gramm-Rudman targets.

“I do this with great reluctance because it will cause real pain,” Aspin said in the letter. “But it is absolutely necessary . . . . If we don’t stand firm now, this Administration will have us playing ‘chicken’ with the budget every year, distorting the deficit reduction process and relying on us to save it from its more irresponsible excesses.”

Although they require the approval of Congress, such spending shifts are routine and usually handled with little notice or debate. But with the current intense scrutiny of the defense budget and congressional Democrats’ desire to cash in on a presumed “peace dividend,” the routine has suddenly become controversial.

Democrats may be retaliating for a Pentagon plan to close three dozen domestic military bases, most of them in Democratic congressional districts, or using the threatened personnel cuts as leverage in defense budget negotiations, Capitol Hill sources speculated.

The strategy also could be a congressional attempt to punish the Administration for proposed cuts in social programs popular with Democrats, they said.

At a Pentagon briefing Tuesday, Williams blasted Aspin’s proposal.

“This would have an absolutely devastating effect on our men and women in uniform . . . it goes in precisely the wrong direction,” he said. “If we are going to achieve those sorts of reductions, we have to be allowed to do it in a deliberate, carefully planned way. You don’t simply reach in and yank out a certain number of people in the force.”

The Pentagon in December proposed to trim 23,600 uniformed personnel from the Army and Air Force to meet the required $1.7 billion in Gramm-Rudman cuts from the 1990 budget. Further personnel cuts were avoided by the request to re-program the $777 million into personnel accounts from other Pentagon budget lines, such as operations, maintainence, procurement and research.

If the re-programming is denied, Williams said, the military services will immediately have to begin laying off from 44,000 to 68,000 people, denying promotions, curtailing enlistments and freezing rotations to new assignments.

“This rather crude approach of denying us the re-programming authority would be devastating to the morale of our men and women in uniform, because it would do it in a totally thoughtless way,” he said.

He also noted that Congress, in authorizing the 1990 budget, specifically gave the Pentagon permission to divert the funds “to minimize the negative effects on the welfare and quality of life of military personnel.”