COLUMN ONE : Helium Program Too Tough to Deflate : The idea of war blimps has gone bust, but this perennial of pork-barrel politics lives on. Backers say the nation’s stockpile of gas will again survive budget cuts.

Billy Jack Moore, general manager of the United States Helium Reserve, slides his government-issue Jeep Cherokee onto the gravel shoulder of old U.S. Route 66 and pulls to a stop 100 yards from Amarillo’s most famous monument to absurdity, the “Cadillac Ranch.” Twenty years ago, Stanley Marsh 3 (not III), the local eccentric rich guy, planted a row of 10 Caddies nose down in arid ranch land and called it art.

“Funny what people do with money,” Moore grumbles, with a deep Texas laugh--and not a trace of irony.

Just across the highway stands an aging industrial plant. Designed to process the lighter-than-air gas helium, it was built more than 60 years ago, when the Army and Navy thought the national defense might soon depend on blimps and dirigibles. The days of airships as critical instruments of war are long past, but the Amarillo Helium Plant is still operated by the U.S. Bureau of Mines--a piece of Billy Jack Moore’s multimillion-dollar empire.

The reserve, consisting of processing equipment, millions of cubic feet of helium-saturated rock, a few Spartan offices and an aging pipeline, was created to assure that the nation never suffered for want of helium. Over several decades, the government bought vast quantities of the inert gas, which was stored by pumping it 3,500 feet below the surface of the Earth into layers of permeable rock that could absorb and preserve it.

Today, with the clean desk and empty schedule of a man whose main task is to make sure nothing happens, Moore, 60, is the Maytag repairman of the federal government. He’s the lonely good servant who runs a program that time forgot.

“Pretty much nobody from Washington ever comes out to visit,” says Moore.

The Bureau of Mines points out that the reserve brings in several million dollars annually in sales of the gas to federal agencies. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that proposals to end the reserve could save $26 million to $36 million over five years.

How could such an historical accident survive, especially in an era of serious budget cutting? The answer speaks louder than any civics textbook or politician’s speech about how America really works.

For his part, Moore has devoted 34 years of his life to safeguarding the reserve, and he takes his charge seriously. So don’t make jokes about party balloons, funny voices and dirigibles in front of him.

As far as he is concerned, the helium reserve, once critical to national security in the age of the Hindenburg, is still a national treasure. And the politicians, from President Clinton to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who openly deride it as a national joke, a stray piece of fiscal absurdity, a taxpayer-supported Cadillac Ranch in a budget-balancing age, just don’t understand.

“How would you like it?” snaps Moore. “People think we’re down here filling dirigibles. We don’t do dirigibles anymore. . . .” He pauses, sheepishly, “Well, we do some dirigibles. . . . “

Certainly the reserve has proved to be a hardy perennial in pork-barrel politics; it wouldn’t have lasted 66 years if it weren’t. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), the leader of a campaign in Congress to kill the program, calls it “an expensive practical joke on the taxpayers.” Yet Ronald Reagan tried a decade ago to kill it and failed; Bill Clinton tried two years ago and failed. Now Cox, Clinton and others are trying again.

They will fail this time too. Of that, Moore is fairly certain. Helium already has outlasted the 100-day Republican Revolution and has even picked up some Republican congressional allies. In fact, William M. (Mac) Thornberry, Amarillo’s Republican freshman congressman, who signed the “contract with America” and defeated a Democratic incumbent last fall thanks to a hard-line stance on balancing the budget, is pressuring Gingrich to spare the program.

Eventually, Moore believes, Washington will come to its senses and realize that you can’t just dump 31 billion cubic feet of helium--enough to keep the reserve in business for 100 years at current rates--onto the market and walk away. That would deluge the world market and virtually destroy the private helium industry.

“How are you going to sell all of it?” Moore wonders. “Congress isn’t being realistic.”

Odds are, Moore chuckles, that long after Clinton and Gingrich are gone, the helium reserve will still be here, patiently waiting for the next great shortage.

Indeed, as Republican leaders in Congress gear up for this summer’s main legislative battle--an assault on spending to comply with the GOP’s promise to balance the budget by 2002--they are likely to go after hundreds of obscure federal programs that on the surface appear to be easy targets.

“I think we can kill helium this year--we have support for it in both parties and in both the House and Senate--but I’m really not sure,” says a senior Republican staffer on the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over the program. “If we as a party are really going to balance the budget, I don’t see how we cannot kill it. But I’ve learned enough about this program to know that there is no telling what the outcome will be.”

Take a tour with plant manager Steve Urbanczyk of the Bureau of Mines’ Excell helium facility 30 miles north of Amarillo, where the helium drawn from the reserve is refined. Here the wheezing, World War II-era pumping equipment and the fading photographs along the walls tell the ancient story of how Washington first got caught up in the helium business.

The very richest helium deposits in the world were discovered by early oil and natural gas producers in the Texas Panhandle around Amarillo. But to the dismay of the U.S. military, natural gas producers in the 1920s saw helium as a nuisance, an uneconomical byproduct of drilling that they simply vented into the atmosphere.

So in 1929, the Navy set up the world’s first helium production facility on the outskirts of Amarillo to support the military’s airship fleet, then considered an important complement to the nation’s growing fixed-wing fleet.

The explosion of the German dirigible Hindenburg in 1937 prompted the world to switch dirigibles from flammable hydrogen to helium, and led to a World War II “helium gap;” America rushed to build five helium production plants to supply air-defense balloons over London and anti-submarine dirigibles hovering over convoys in the North Atlantic.

With the advent of more modern aircraft and air defenses, blimps became an anachronism and the helium program seemed destined for the postwar scrap heap. But it hung on long enough to hitch onto another technological wave: the space program. NASA found helium ideal for purging and cleansing rocket fuel tanks, and Washington wasn’t about to deny funding for something that might help America win the race to the Moon.

In 1960, at the height of the Cold War and the post-Sputnik frenzy, Congress approved a massive expansion of the helium program.

Then Washington put it on autopilot.

And promptly forgot about what it had done for more than a decade.

In 1973, Interior Secretary Rogers Morton was horrified to learn that his Bureau of Mines had accumulated 35 billion cubic feet of helium--enough to satisfy the government’s needs for 100 years, and at least 10 times the world’s annual demand. The bureaucrats in Amarillo--never having received new orders--were still spending $47.5 million every year to buy more.

Morton yanked on the plug.

But it was too late.

Congress and the Bureau of Mines have been dealing with the consequences ever since.

The government hasn’t stored any new helium since 1973, and has been using up the old reserve for the shuttle and other space programs. But after 20 years, there is still enough to last another century.

In the meantime, a private helium industry generating sales of about $200 million annually has sprung up to meet the growing commercial demand--helium is used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines, for example--complicating the government’s efforts to shed its albatross.

Private producers--including such large energy conglomerates as Mesa Petroleum and Phillips Petroleum--built helium plants along a 425-mile pipeline in Texas and Kansas operated by the Bureau of Mines, and now store their own helium in the Amarillo reserve. They use the pipeline and storage facility nearly free of charge, and want to make sure both keep operating.

Fearful that large sales from the government’s reserve could destroy their market, the private producers also pressured the George Bush Administration in 1991 to raise the price the government charges for helium from $37.50 per 1,000 cubic feet to $55, which put it well above any private long-term contract. “Why should the government be in competition with the private sector?” asks Carl Johnson, chairman of the Helium Advisory Council, the industry’s lobbying arm.

The government’s sales promptly fell by nearly 50%, and the Bureau of Mines lost all of its private customers. NASA and other U.S. agencies, required by law to buy from the reserve, were the only ones left. The Bureau of Mines’ new job of supplying helium for the Border Patrol’s drug interdiction dirigibles along the Mexican border has barely made a dent.

The price hike has had plenty of other unintended consequences. The drop in demand for government helium has slowed the reserve’s ability to pay off its debt, Moore says.

In fact, the Bureau of Mines borrowed $250 million from the Treasury to finance its helium purchases in the 1960s. It has never paid it back, and interest is still accumulating.

Today, the Bureau of Mines owes the Treasury $1.4 billion.

Yet the government has allowed the condition of its helium facilities to erode so badly that they are virtually worthless. “Nobody would buy this plant,” sighs Excell plant manager Urbanczyk. “It’s so old we could only sell it for scrap.”

Trying to sort out this bureaucratic train wreck has bedeviled some of the best minds on Capitol Hill. What’s made it especially tough is that Amarillo has been blessed with a series of clever congressmen who have thwarted every attempt to shut down the reserve. And so longtime observers have learned to be cautious in predicting the program’s demise.

In 1988, after tussling with Republican Rep. Beau Bolter, the Reagan Administration cut a deal to spare the reserve in exchange for Bolter’s support for the closing of a smaller U.S. Bureau of Reclamation facility in Amarillo.

In 1993--in a tale retold in “The Agenda,” Bob Woodward’s book about the Clinton Administration--Democratic Rep. Bill Sarpaulis saved helium from the White House budget ax in exchange for his support for Clinton’s tax hike.

Again in 1994, a bill to end the program unanimously passed the House Natural Resources Committee--only to die a mysterious death in the House Rules Committee after Sarpaulis intervened, with the support of then-Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.).

Ironically, it was Sarpaulis’ vote for Clinton’s tax increase that ultimately ended his political career, and brought Thornberry to Washington.

The civic leadership of Amarillo is solidly behind the helium reserve--and its 180 jobs. “Going after helium is just a cynical attempt to make it a symbol, and that’s unfair,” complains Kel Seliger, Amarillo’s Republican mayor. “We’re under attack from outsiders, and everybody here agrees it should be preserved,” adds Jerome Johnson, a prominent attorney and leading Democrat.

Thornberry echoes his constituents: “It’s a poor example of a budget cut to hold up before the entire nation.” And he has quietly taken up right where Sarpaulis left off. He wangled himself a seat on the subcommittee that oversees the helium reserve, and has won a pledge from the Republican leadership that they won’t go after helium “without first taking his concerns into account,” notes one leadership aide.

Given the complexities of the case, even Cox has backed off his original proposal to simply shut down the entire operation and sell it off as quickly as possible. His new legislation, widely supported by the helium industry and Republican and Democratic leaders, would shut down the government’s production facilities after one year, but have the Bureau of Mines continue to operate the storage facility and pipeline, and charge higher rates for the use of the facilities by private producers.

But to attract support from the industry, private producers would be allowed to buy the federal helium and then resell it at a profit to NASA and other agencies. Finally, after 2005, the Bureau of Mines would begin a 10-year campaign to sell off the rest of the reserve--if such big sales wouldn’t hurt private producers.

“Times have changed, and we are finally on the verge of killing this proposal once and for all,” Cox claims.

Yet if his bill passes, the government will still be in the helium business for another generation.

And Billy Jack Moore will have time to groom a successor.

“You know, I’m very disappointed at how we are portrayed,” says helium production supervisor John Litchfield, who is a generation younger than Moore.

“John Q. Public just doesn’t understand. . . . “