Pet Project Seeks Presidential Yacht

It was auctioned off for $286,000 in 1977 by President Carter in his effort to eliminate symbols of the “imperial presidency.” Now Congress has set aside $2 million to help buy back the Sequoia, the onetime presidential yacht, as a museum piece.

The provision is one of many not directly related to government operations that were slipped into a massive spending bill that will fund 13 Cabinet departments and a host of independent agencies for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

The way was cleared for the $388-billion bill to go to President Bush after the House on Monday stripped from the measure a controversial provision that would have given some members of Congress and their staffs access to individuals’ income tax returns.

The House and Senate approved the bill last month. But the tax provision prompted Congress to delay sending it to Bush until the House acted to strike the single sentence, as the Senate had done.

The bill’s Republican drafters said they never intended to undermine the privacy of tax returns, but rather aimed to authorize members of Congress and their staffs to inspect Internal Revenue Service facilities as part of their oversight.

Lawmakers rejected requests by taxpayer watchdog groups to scrap the spending bill altogether. The groups have complained that the 3,646-page bill is filled with lawmakers’ pet projects, despite claims by its authors that it is tight in an era of record federal budget deficits.

One target of the watchdogs’ criticism is the provision providing for purchase of the 104-foot, 79-year-old Sequoia. The yacht, which one historian described as a floating White House, was used by every president from Herbert Hoover to Gerald R. Ford.

The current owner, who rents out the boat for $10,000 a night, said Monday that the $2 million wasn’t enough to buy the boat, but said that it could be used as seed money to raise private funds.

Owner Gary Silversmith, a Washington lawyer who bought the yacht for about $2 million in 1999 and has spent at least as much on improvements to the wooden vessel, didn’t say how much he would accept. But he said he already had been offered more than $7 million for it by someone who wanted to move the yacht to Russia.

“I’ll sell it at a discount to the government,” he said, “but I still have to pay my own debts.”

Democrats have ridiculed the provision, calling it frivolous in a time of record federal budget deficits.

But Silversmith said, “Saving the Sequoia and getting it in the hands of a responsible American nonprofit entity is not an example of pork.”

Historians also cheered the funding.

“It’s one of the great treasures of the United States,” said Kim Nielsen, director of the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington. “It’s a fantastic piece of Americana that deserves the highest level of preservation.”

Silversmith said that he had not sought to include the provision in the spending bill. And a spokesman for the White House budget office said the administration did not request the funding.

A congressional Republican leadership aide said the provision was included because of concern that the yacht might be sold, perhaps for use as a riverboat casino.