While the world waits to see what North Korea launches into the skies next week, missile defense boosters are wasting no time in using the event as an excuse to undercut efforts to trim the program’s excesses.

The Hermit Kingdom’s declaration last month that it would advance its space program by using a missile to launch a satellite in early April almost seemed timed to coincide with the President’s pledge to trim “Cold War weapons” from his 2010 budget. The Obama Administration reportedly asked the Pentagon to cut $2 billion from the program’s $9 billion annual allotment, which has racked up more than $130 billion in costs since its inception during the Reagan era.

Some analysts in Washington as well as South Korea and Japan worry that North Korea just wants to test a ballistic missile, though the Pentagon doesn’t plan to use missile defense to shoot it down. But that hasn’t deterred lawmakers from uniting with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and the defense industry to campaign for full-bore MDA funding.

“Every time a foreign adversary tests a missile or launches a satellite, these programs become more vital to our own well-being. This is why it is more important than ever that missile defense be a top budgeting priority,” wrote freshman Representative Parker Griffith (D-AL) in an op-ed published in the Huntsville Times last Sunday. “Missile defense creates a chain of employment that helps our region's and the nation's financial stability,” he added.

Griffith was preaching to the missile defense choir. His northern Alabama district includes the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command as well as the massive civilian industry supporting it. Griffith joined a delegation that has worked hard to keep missile defense firmly entrenched in Pentagon bureaucracy. The group includes Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as well as neighbor and fellow missile defense stalwart Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS). Tapping powerful perches on the Appropriations Committee (Sens. Shelby and Cochran), lawmakers added 40 earmarks worth $161 million for space and missile defense projects to spending bills over the last two years.

But parochially-minded members aren’t alone on their missile defense road show. Boeing recently rented a Washington hotel ballroom to extol the thousands of jobs it claims are dependent on the program while handing out missile defense-themed pens and dart boards alongside the cheese and crackers. Meanwhile, former MDA director Lt. General Henry “Trey” Obering appeared in full uniform in a documentary funded by the Heritage Foundation, telling the camera that failing to fully fund missile defense would be “morally bankrupt.”

These promoters hope that talk about jobs and enemies will bury the fact that “the performance of (missile defense) as a whole can not yet be determined,” as a recent Government Accountability Office report states. MDA continues to tout the success of its orchestrated tests despite the absence of realistic conditions, including countermeasures. But it’s difficult to track the program’s effectiveness with an opaque and unaccountable budget process void of baselines that allow Congress and other watchdogs to determine its effectiveness.

The fact is, nothing North Korea launches next week will improve missile defense’s past record. We should look at this event as an opportunity to press for action pledged by lawmakers such as Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) to fix MDA’s broken acquisition process and ensure we invest in systems that work rather than elaborate, expensive ones that don’t. In this economic climate, bending to parochial interests or industry’s cynical marketing of weapons systems as jobs programs will truly bankrupt us.