Washington, D.C. – The following is a statement from Steve Ellis, Vice President for Programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense, on the Defense Department Fiscal Year 2007 Appropriations bill which was passed by Congress today and awaits the President’s signature:

The annual Department of Defense appropriations bill is, by far, the single largest spending measure that Congress will pass this year. Every year, this enormous bill is a virtual treasure-trove in which members squirrel away pork projects to bring home to voters. While TCS will not complete a full analysis of this bill for a little while, the FY07 bill is clearly on its way to match or break the record earmark levels of the FY06 bill, which included 2,837 parochial and politically motivated earmarks worth $11.2 billion dollars. The RDT&E (Research, Development, Test and Evaluation) section of the bill contains 2,012 earmarks, comparing closely to the 2,070 earmarks in the same section of the FY06 bill.

Ironically, the first spending bill passed after the heralded and praised earmark transparency bill doesn’t have a single lawmaker owning up to an earmark. All of the bill’s $433.6 billion in spending has sailed through the new rule’s wide-open loopholes. The only acknowledgement of the change is a small mention at the end of the conference report stating that no provisions meet the earmark criteria. Even the bill writers didn’t say the bill didn’t contain earmarks, just that none meet the definition outlined in the rule change.

Simply put, earmarking defense dollars dilutes the effectiveness of defense spending. Instead of funding programs relative to their necessity for national security, lawmakers are focused on protecting their local district’s jobs and parochial pork. Programs should be funded relative to their national security merits, not the political muscle of the lawmaker supporting them.

Unfortunately, this is not the case in the defense appropriations bill. Programs receiving earmarks are not necessarily underfunded to begin with, not necessarily of any strategic importance, and often not awarded based on merit. Earmarks undergo virtually no review, making it impossible to distinguish between truly meritorious projects and those that are pure pork. Despite congressional members’ lofty rhetoric about putting our troops first, the earmarks they lavish on their districts often do nothing to help our troops on the battlefield.

Here is a sample of some of the earmarks in the FY07 Defense spending bill:

• C-17 inflation. The underlying bill contains 12 new Boeing C-17s. The $70 billion emergency bridge funding portion of the bill contained 3 additional C-17s when it originally passed the House and Senate. In conference, that number ballooned to 10 additional C-17s at a cost of more than $2 billion.
• Fully-Integrated Solar-Powered Interior Lighting Technology $1M (House) p261
• Large Panel Sapphire Productibility $1.2M (House) p264
• Production of Alternative Energy for Defense from Alaskan Raw Materials $1M (House) p271
• Alternative Futures at the Range-Complex Level for the Southwest US $1M (House & Senate) p29
• John H. Hopps Defense Research Scholars Program $1M (House; Moorehead College, Atlanta GA) p292
• Holloman High Speed Test Track $3.9M (Senate, NM) p318
• Advanced Solar Covers $1M (House) p73
• WMD – Civil Support Team FL $6.7M (house) p73
• National Guard About Face Academy $1M (house) p73
• Tooele Army SCWO/Depot Hydrolysis Demilitarization Demonstration Program $1M (Senate; Hatch UT) p97
• Load, Assemble and Pack (LAP) Modernization – Lone Star $4.5M
• Senate; Lincoln & Pryor Texarkana, AR) p98
• Combustion Light Gas Gun Projectile $4M (Senate; VA) p234
• Acoustic Littoral Glider $5M (Senate) p236
• Intelligent work management $1.8M (House) p239
• Permanent Magnet Linear Generator power buoy system $2M (Senate) p243
• Army Center for Excellence in Acoustics – $4.6M (MS) p. 200 (What I love about this one is that it goes to Ole Miss – to the Jamie Whitten center, named for a legendary appropriations chair).
• Rarefaction Wave Gun – $1.1M (NY) p. 200
• Next Generation Chem-biological protection suit – $1M p202
• Natick Soldier Center $1M (MA) p202
• Prostate Cancer DNA detection initiative $1.2M p208
• Unmanned Ground Vehicle Initiative $6.5M (MI) p211
• Applied Counterspace Technology Testbed $13.6M (AL) p213
• Reagan Test Site Distributed Operations Control Center $1.95B (AL) p215
• Digitization to Support Fort Hood University XXI – $1.5M p221
• 172nd SIB Range (Infantry Brigade (separate)) $18M (AK) p110
• Allocate sufficient funding for Container Roll-In Roll Out Platform M3 CROP (manufactured by Summa Technologies in Huntsville, AL & Hyundai Precision America in San Diego, CA) p112
• Rock Island Arsenal Production (IL) $6.3M p111
• Radford Army Ammunition Plant (VA) $32.7M P98
• Scranton Army Ammunition Plant (PA) $1M p98
• Alaska Land Mobile Radio $3.5M p107
• Air Force Academy Telescope $5.5M p169
• Armor & Structures Transformation Initiative (ASTI) Steel to Titanium $2.9M p178
• Illicit Narcotics Lab Detection System $1.95M p194
• National Center for Infotonics (NY) $1M p195
• Northern California Institute for Research and Education $2.6M