Wendy Jordan has analyzed every Pentagon budget request for the last 35 years. She has a multi-faceted understanding of defense programs. And an encyclopedic knowledge of Congressional action. And a voice that listeners of this podcast will soon be missing. Hit play and hear the Wendy Jordan exit interview (uncensored).

Episode 45: Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Budget Watchdog All Federal, the podcast dedicated to making sense of the budget, spending, and tax issues facing the nation. Cut through the partisan rhetoric and talking points for the facts about what’s being talked about, bandied about, and pushed to Washington, brought to you by Taxpayers for Common Sense. And now, the host of Budget Watchdog AF, TCS President Steve Ellis.

Steve Ellis:

Welcome to all American taxpayers seeking common sense. You’ve made it to the right place. For over 25 years, TCS, that’s Taxpayers for Common Sense, has served as an independent nonpartisan Budget Watchdog group based in Washington DC. We believe in fiscal policy for America that is based on facts. We believe in transparency and accountability because no matter where you are in the political spectrum, no one wants to see their tax dollars wasted. Today we’re talking with someone who really doesn’t want to see their tax dollars wasted during a career of service that has, to this early date, already encompassed seven and a half years working in the House of Representatives, six and a half years working at the Pentagon, 15 years in the private sector, and 10 years right here at Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Wendy Jordan has analyzed every Pentagon budget request for the last 39 years. She has a multifaceted understanding of defense programs and an encyclopedic knowledge of congressional action and a voice that listeners of this podcast will soon be missing as she returns to the Pentagon mother ship. TCS senior policy analyst Wendy Jordan, welcome back to the Budget Watchdog AF podcast.

Wendy Jordan:

Thank you, Steve. I can hardly believe this will be my last appearance on the podcast.

Steve Ellis:

Well, certainly, even though we’ve only had a couple of years, you’ve been a frequent flyer.

Wendy Jordan:

I have been. You bet. Do I get an upgrade on my seat next time?

Steve Ellis:

Sure, and we’ll get you peanuts.

Wendy Jordan:

Okay, great.

Steve Ellis:

All right. Wendy, your long history in Pentagon budgets has allowed you to hone your ability to predict which technologies, contractors, and segments of national security spending are likely to grow or decline. How do you do it?

Wendy Jordan:

Gosh, how do I do it? If after working 40 years in the same city on the same issues, if you haven’t picked up a thing or two, you’re probably not paying attention. So it’s really just repetition. It’s like learning the multiplication tables, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah. Well, certainly with Pentagon spending, those multiplication tables, there’s exponents in them and such, so.

Wendy Jordan:

Yeah, there’s no subtraction when it comes to Pentagon spending. It’s all addition.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah. No division either.

Wendy Jordan:

Yeah.

Steve Ellis:

So thinking back, I was thinking back to some of your products and such and things that you’ve done here, and I’m wondering what are some of your favorites. I think the first product that you did or first major report that you did was the unaffordable F-35.

Wendy Jordan:

Right. That was my first long-form piece that I did and we looked at alternatives. Given the vast cost of the F-35, which listeners of the podcast know is an aircraft that is being flown by all three military services who fly jet fighters, so the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, it is a hugely expensive program. We heard a lot of talk on the Hill. Well, there’s no alternative. We have to do this. We have to buy this. So we sat down at TCS and looked at potential alternatives to upgrading F-18s, upgrading F-15s, how much that will cost as opposed to how much the… It’s not really just the procurement of the F-35s, it’s the long range sustainment of the F-35 that gets you into hundreds of billions of dollars in expense.

Steve Ellis:

Trillion dollars, I believe, at the end, yeah.

Wendy Jordan:

Right, CBO estimate. Yeah.

Steve Ellis:

Certainly the Pentagon, in their effort to get that over the finish line to get the F-35 into production, it basically promised all things to all people. It was supposed to do close air support. It was supposed to be a fighter and deal with all these other things. It had a variant that was, like you said, for the Marine Corps, for vertical lift. It had a variant that was for carriers because you have to have more reinforced for carrier landing and also deal with corrosion.

Wendy Jordan:

Corrosion control, right. Yeah.

Steve Ellis:

I have my favorite, and it was my contribution to that report was we called it The Platinum Plated Spork.

Wendy Jordan:

Yes. I remember scrambling for images of sporks that we could use in the report. Well, I will say, as we talked about, I’ve been in Washington a long time and so this will be the third cycle of attempting to build a joint aircraft program for all three military services that fly them. The second iteration of that, I actually worked on the litigation. One of my times in the private sector, I was at a major law firm and we were involved in the litigation in the aftermath of the canceling of the A-12 aircraft, which was to be an attack aircraft flown by all three military services that unfortunately, as the Marine Corps and the Air Force pulled out of the program, the cost became untenable as far as the Navy was concerned. The per aircraft price became too high and the Navy ended up terminating the program altogether.

So here’s what’s good about the F-35. It’s gotten past that. All three services are indeed going to fly them. That has kept the unit cost, I’m not going to say reasonable, but it has kept the unit cost down. So we’ve gotten past that hurdle. All three services are going to fly it, but joint aircraft development for all three services is fraught with problems and the F-35 lived through some of those.

Steve Ellis:

Definitely, definitely. Yeah, and also trying to sell them all to our allies. That’s the other way to keep the unit cost down.

Wendy Jordan:

Right.

Steve Ellis:

Your time at TCS, you haven’t just been Pentagon-focused. I can remember early on the border security work and then even some cybersecurity work. I don’t know if you remember. I thought about this when I was at your desk the other day and that there’s the infographic that we did of the border security deal.

Wendy Jordan:

Right. Yeah, I found that under my blotter when I was cleaning up my desk, and so I put it up on the corkboard next to my desk. Yeah, that was what exactly will it cost, back then it was a Republican plan, to make the border more secure with technology. Imagine that as opposed to building a wall.

Steve Ellis:

Right. Well, as part of that whole package that we were trying to get the whole border security and immigration package over, and it was something that the border agents previously had requested, one of my favorite images in that was that basically, it was an old enough package that the helicopter that was part of the deal was no longer produced.

Wendy Jordan:

Wasn’t made anymore, but Congress put it in anyway. I was like, wow. That’s going to be hard to do because they don’t make that helicopter anymore. So we drew it on the imager. We didn’t. The company that we contracted with to do the infographic drew it with a dotted line outline to show that you couldn’t actually buy that aircraft anymore. Yeah, that was crazy.

Steve Ellis:

The ghost helicopter, yeah.

Wendy Jordan:

Right. Let’s see. I’ve done a couple of Golden Fleeces, called the Kaiserslautern.

Steve Ellis:

Oh, nice. Yeah.

Wendy Jordan:

My favorite.

Steve Ellis:

Yes.

Wendy Jordan:

My favorite. That goes back to when I was a very young congressional staffer. It was my first year working for a member of the Appropriations Committee. Late in the afternoon, the day before the defense appropriations bill was going to be marked up, we got the chairman’s mark as it’s called. I was reading through it so that I could write a memo for my boss for the markup the next day so he would know what was in there for Arizona, which is the state he was from, obviously, and just items of interest, what the top line was compared to the previous year’s top line and just pulling out some numbers and facts. It was the first time I had ever read through the general provisions, which careful listeners of the podcast know that I always recommend to people, read the general provisions because that’s where they get up to the mischief. In the general provisions, which is language telling the administration to do or not to do something, but it is not in the tables and bill language section of the appropriations bill.

So I was flipping through reading the general provisions quickly because it was a couple of hundred pages and I had to do this and write the memo for my boss and my eye fell on the phrase, anthracite coal. I remember thinking, what on earth in the Pentagon spending bill has to do with anthracite coal? So I stopped and I read the full passage, which was several paragraphs, and it required coal from specifically numbered mines in Pennsylvania, a certain grade of anthracite coal that only came from certain mines in Pennsylvania to be shipped to Europe to heat military barracks, buildings, housing, hospitals, you name it, on military bases in Europe. I just remember thinking, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever read. So I picked up the phone and called one of the staff people who I knew at the Appropriations Committee, professional staff, and I said, “Hey, what’s this thing about shipping coal from Pennsylvania to Europe? It seems a little crazy to me.”

I won’t name the staff guy because I’m sure he is still alive. He said, “Leave it alone.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Tell Mr. Kolbe to leave it alone.” I was like, “Well, it seems a little wasteful to me to do that. There’s plenty of coal in Europe, right?” And he said, “This is the Pennsylvania delegation. Don’t touch this. You’re going to lose.” So I wrote up the memo. I did not put that language in there. I went and spoke to the congressman about it and I said, “There’s this crazy provision about shipping coal.” He’s like, “What?” I said, “But the professional staffer told me to stay out of it or that you should stay out of it because you would annoy the Pennsylvania delegation and also, that the senior Republican on the committee would support that language being left in there.” My boss on the committee was a Republican. So I told all that to my boss and he said, “Okay, leave it alone.”

So I frankly didn’t think about it again until fast-forward 30 years and I’m reading through the general provisions of the defense appropriations bill sitting at my desk, get Taxpayers for Common Sense and my eye fell on the phrase anthracite coal. I thought to myself, no, there’s no way this is still in there 30 years later. Come on. And it was. It was a [inaudible 00:12:45] down provision. It wasn’t as wide-ranging as the one back in the ’80s, but it was still there. So I wandered over you and the former president of TCS, Ryan, sat across from each other in the same room I sat in. So I took the bill and I went over and I started telling you guys this funny story about how, wow, this goes back to 30 years ago when I was a congressional staff and you both just stared at me. One or the other of you said, “That’s crazy.” I said, “Well, yes.” And so we made it one of our Golden Fleeces. You can explain to folks what the Golden Fleece is and what it means to TCS.

Steve Ellis:

Well, certainly. It’s William Proxmire, former Senator William Proxmire, late Senator William Proxmire bequeathed to TCS back in the year 2000. It was what he did and his staff did on a monthly basis of awarding these fleeces to various wasteful federal programs and occasionally rewarding certain ones, saying they were good. But anyway, so we’ve used that to highlight wasteful programs and certainly shipping coal from Pennsylvania to Kaiserslautern in Germany certainly fits the bill. So it was lauded in that whole bit and did a whole report. The original congressman that pushed for it was a guy named Congressman Flood who had an amazing mustache, a curlicue mustache.

Wendy Jordan:

He did, with wax on the ends.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah. Then ended up he was corrupt as well. It had a corrupt beginning and finally, we were able to tackle that and got a vote again to stop it in the floor. So then moving along, thinking about some of the other things that you’ve worked on, one of your favorites is your Zero to Heroes.

Wendy Jordan:

Zero to Hero, yes, that’s right. Zero to Hero is again in the defense budget. I go through the procurement tables when the Senate Appropriations Committee and the House Appropriations Committee report out their versions of the defense spending bill each year. They have tables in there and I read through them. Yes, I read every single line of every table and I look for programs where the administration has requested nothing, zip, zero,-

Steve Ellis:

Zilch.

Wendy Jordan:

… either the House or the Senate. I look for ones where it’s a zero in the presidential budget request, and yet either the House or the Senate has put money against the program. So we were looking for a catchy phrase because at TCS, we always like to put an interesting spin on what are essentially very boring budget numbers. I came up with Zero to Hero and they have become quite the widely read charts. We’re in certainly many billions of dollars every year, programs that the Pentagon didn’t ask for at all, not even on an unfunded priorities list, but it is money is put against it by the Congress and ends up in the final bill that the president signs.

Our position at TCS is in a 750, 850-billion-dollar top line for the Pentagon, if the Pentagon hasn’t asked for it, hasn’t managed to make room for it in their budget, probably it’s not a high priority for them, but Congress does what Congress does, which is understandable. It’s their job to review the president’s budget request and make changes to it. Our job is to call out when something hasn’t been requested at all, but has been funded by Congress.

Steve Ellis:

Well, and you touched on very briefly there too, something else that is not quite requested by the Pentagon or at least not by the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, but the UPLs, the unfunded priorities.

Wendy Jordan:

Right. Again, going back to when I was a Congressional staffer in the ’80s, unfunded priorities lists were something that during the first budget hearing of the year for each of the military services, the chief of the military services, so let’s use the Navy for example, the chief of naval operations is seated next to the secretary of the Navy at the witness table, answering questions from either the Armed Services Committee or the Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee. Members of Congress would ask, “Is there anything that didn’t make it into the budget, admiral, that you really wanted to see that somehow either the Office of the Secretary of Defense bumped it out in the budget process, or possibly the Office of Management and Budget at the White House bumped it out? Is there anything that you really need that didn’t make it into the budget request?”

I can remember watching these senior military guys squirm, frankly, because they’re sitting next to the service secretary and they don’t want to say, “Yeah, we don’t support that budget” or, this is in the Reagan administration, somebody with a straight face saying, “The Reagan administration has not given me enough money to do what I need.”

Steve Ellis:

The Reagan administration with secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, the 600-ship Navy.

Wendy Jordan:

That’s right. That’s right, 600-ship Navy. Very good. So nobody really want to answer that question, the senior military guys, so they came up with this, I want to say half-assed, but I can’t say half-assed on the podcast. Let’s see.

Steve Ellis:

Hey, it’s your last podcast. You can say what you want, Wendy.

Wendy Jordan:

I guess. So they came up with this half-assed plan where the military services would come up with written lists, and it was 15 or 20 items, maybe always procurement, never R&D or O&M or whatever. They would say, “Well, Congressman, as a matter of fact, I do have this list,” and they would hand it over because they were asked to hand it over in a committee hearing. They’re under oath and so they would say, “Yes, I do have this list. Here you go.” Well, that caused some friction with various secretaries of defense and one in particular said, “You’re not going to do that anymore, military services, so stop offering up these lists when you’re asked for them.” So Congress responded by saying, “You’re now required by law to produce these lists.” And now it’s not just the military services and Special Operations Command, which is basically what it was 30, 40 years ago. Now it’s everybody. You have Missile Defense Agency and the POW/MIA office. You name it.

My joke is if you have a membership in the Pentagon mess, Congress wants to see your unfunded priorities list. Again, same argument that we have with the Zero to Hero list. If they haven’t managed to squeeze it into an 800 plus-billion-dollar budget top line, it might not be much of a priority.

Steve Ellis:

They’re certainly right. Then we’ve just scratched the surface of your tenure here, but you have things like going after the littoral combat ship or the ground-based missiles of the nuclear triad. Maybe give our podcast listeners one or two favorites or favorite memories?

Wendy Jordan:

I think one of the things that I have always found perplexing, and this goes back not just in my time at TCS, but when a service chief, in particular, a military service chief says, “I no longer need X” or “X does not perform the way I expect it to and so I don’t think we should spend any more money on it,” that Congress, often due to parochial issues with either where that system is produced or where it’s based, will block doing what the military services are offering up as their best military advice on how to handle something. So the littoral combat ship is a big example of that. The Navy wants to retire some of the early ones that don’t do the anti-submarine warfare mission as well as the Navy needs it done. The chief of naval operations has been very blunt and in the open in congressional hearings saying, “I’m not putting another dime against this program because it doesn’t perform the way we need it to perform.”

It’s not just ships. There’s aircraft as well that the secretary of the Air Force has been trying to retire. Having worked on the Hill for two different members of Congress, one from Virginia, one from Arizona, both states with a major military presence, I understand the impulse to protect what you have in your district or in your state, but I think particularly if you serve on the committees that oversee our national security policy, that the advice of the senior military leaders needs to have more weight.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah. You haven’t touched on some of the arcane rules and policies of Congress…

Wendy Jordan:

Oh, the Holman rule.

Steve Ellis:

We’re going to get to the Antideficiency Act, but then now, you have to worry about the Holman rule because you are going back in and maybe some of these numbers of Congress.

Wendy Jordan:

Oh, my heavens.

Steve Ellis:

Oh, that Wendy Jordan,-

Wendy Jordan:

Oh, my heavens,

Steve Ellis:

… she went after my program when she was at Taxpayers for Common Sense. The Holman rule, it goes back into the 19th century. To your listeners, I think we have talked about this before, where basically Congress can zero out the salary of an individual federal worker or a group of federal workers.

Wendy Jordan:

Yes. A single office or a single employee and it was to get at patronage jobs, no-show employees. It was post-Civil War, wasn’t it?

Steve Ellis:

Yeah, it was 1880s or so, yeah.

Wendy Jordan:

Oh, so quite a bit post-Civil War. People were given jobs that they didn’t actually have to show up for. They were federal jobs. They got paid by the federal government, obviously, but they weren’t expected to show up. Sometimes they didn’t even live where the job was long before working from home was a thing. So this rule was put in place to be able to zero out the salary for those people. Way back when Tip O’Neill was the speaker of the House, it was actually my first year on Capitol Hill. I should say the Holman Rule is ensconced not in federal law, but in the rules of the House of Representatives. It allows a member to bring a privileged motion to the floor without going through the Rules Committee for this purpose to X out an employee’s salary. So Speaker O’Neill got rid of the practice in the ’80s, and so I heard about it way back then.

Then the last Republican House speakership, not this one, but Speaker Ryan resurrected it. It was X-ed out again when Speaker Pelosi was a speaker, and now it is back in this iteration of the Republican-led House of Representatives. You can imagine the consternation that that raises for federal employees who, let’s say you’re an auditor at IRS and you draw the account of some member of Congress or the cousin to some member of Congress, who knows, and all of a sudden, you are targeted to have your salary taken to zero. I guess I can’t actually fire the person, but they can make it so they’re not paid.

Steve Ellis:

Well, it’d certainly be less incentive to show up to work.

Wendy Jordan:

I guess. So we did a five fast facts on that. We also have written a lot about the Impoundment Control Act and the Antideficiency Act, which are hardcore appropriations law that I actually learned about back when I was at the law firm after I left Capitol Hill. The Antideficiency Act states that no federal agency can spend money in advance or in excess of a federal appropriation. So basically, you can’t get ahead of the Congress and spend more money or spend money before it’s been actually appropriated on a program. The Impoundment Control Act is once Congress has appropriated it, you either have to spend it or you have to tell Congress why you’re not spending it in a rescission package that is sent to the Hill. The Antideficiency Act came into play recently in the Trump administration when President Trump was attempting to transfer money from military construction projects at the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security to build the wall.

The Homeland Security Appropriations Bill had specifically said that no money could be spent to build a wall on the southern border, so spending money in that way was a violation of the Antideficiency Act and getting ahead of an appropriation by Congress. The Impoundment Control Act was much in the news when President Trump was planning to withhold funding that had been appropriated for Ukraine. So all these nerdy, nerdy things that I worked on a zillion years ago were suddenly much in the news and we got to write and talk about them.

Steve Ellis:

Well, the impoundment is a pretty good spot to leave this, Wendy, because that was part of the 1974 budget reform and Impoundment Control Act that created the modern budget process that we operate under, it’s kind of, these days.

Wendy Jordan:

Which was before I was a congressional staffer, I hasten to add.

Steve Ellis:

Yes. So for our Budget Watchdog AF faithful, I just want to thank you for your time at TCS. Wendy, it’s been a pleasure working with you.

Wendy Jordan:

Thank you.

Steve Ellis:

We’ll miss you and your show tune references.

Wendy Jordan:

That’s right. We didn’t even talk about my penchant for show tunes, which comes from my mother who used to play them over and over and over again when I was a little kid. You can test me on this. I know all the lyrics to all the songs in about probably 20 or 25 Broadway musicals.

Steve Ellis:

Maybe the next time we have you on the podcast, Wendy.

Wendy Jordan:

Yeah. Nobody needs to hear me sing. There’s enough ugliness in the world without me engaging in public singing.

Steve Ellis:

Yeah. Well, I’m joining you with that too. Nobody wants to hear me sing. Well, there you have it, podcast listeners. Elvis has left the building, at least for now. No Blue Hawaiis. This is the frequency. Mark it on your dial. Subscribe and share and know this, Taxpayers for Common Sense has your Back, America. We read the bills, monitor the earmarks, and highlight those wasteful programs that poorly spend our money and shift long-term risk to taxpayers. We’ll be back with a new episode soon. I hope you’ll meet us right here to learn more.