Waste Charged in U.S. Studies of Chemical, Germ Warfare Defenses

A Pentagon program charged with studying defenses against biological and chemical warfare wasted about 40% of its money and more than half its projects on unnecessary or redundant research, the General Accounting Office reported Monday.

“GAO’s report disturbs me because it is another example of mismanagement within a government program,” said Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

But the reported inefficiencies pose no danger to U.S. forces facing possible attack by Iraqi chemical or biological agents, he said.

Glenn asked the GAO to look into the Pentagon’s Biological Defense Research Program nearly two years ago. GAO investigators studied 218 research projects in the program over the past seven years, during which Congress had appropriated a total of $370 million.

Nearly 20% of the money, or $47 million, was dedicated to 49 projects. The money was “unnecessarily expended . . . on research projects that did not address validated biological warfare threat agents,” the GAO said.

Another $48 million, or just over 20%, was spent on 57 projects whose validity the GAO could not determine.

In addition, the GAO said, the program apparently went ahead with research into validated biological and chemical warfare threats that already were being intensively researched by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control or both. Among the diseases in this category were anthrax, encephalitis, Dengue fever, yellow fever and botulism.

The GAO also looked more generally at the research program’s record since 1965. It concluded that of 10 medical products developed as biochemical warfare countermeasures, three projects costing $17 million were directed at diseases considered “not a biological threat agent but a naturally occurring, or ‘infectious,’ disease that affects large numbers of people in various parts of the world.”

“I want to stress that this report does not imply that our men and women currently deployed on Operation Desert Storm are insufficiently protected against any biological or chemical weapons attack,” Glenn said in releasing the report, which was completed late last month.

However, he added that the program’s concentration on “exotic human pathogens in the 1980s . . . failed to produce medical countermeasures against many ‘conventional’ biological agents, such as a vaccine against anthrax.”

Glenn said that meant the Department of Defense had to purchase medical countermeasures from the private sector “to ensure that our troops were protected.”

He added: “ I call on DOD to follow GAO’s recommendations and discontinue all (biological research) projects that do not address validated biowarfare threats.”