*EPF412 02/14/2002
Panel Chairman Defends Congressional Earmarks for Defense Budget
(Rumsfeld's proposals for 2003 well received by committee) (630)

By Ralph Dannheisser
Washington File Congressional Correspondent

Washington -- Congress is concerned over a disdainful attitude expressed by some Bush administration officials toward the legislature's role in the budget process, the chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee has told Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"It concerns us that some executive branch officials have recently been making suggestions that congressional initiatives and specific recommendations for funding in appropriations bills are unwarranted intrusions in the budget process," Representative Jerry Lewis (Republican, California) said February 14 in opening a hearing at which Rumsfeld was the main witness.

Rumsfeld acknowledged that "there is a wealth of accumulated knowledge here on this committee," declaring that the Fiscal Year 2003 budget request, now before Congress, demonstrates that "we are listening." But at the same time, he observed that Congress had made changes to 2,022 individual programs and line items contained in the Defense Department's Fiscal Year 2002 budget.

"Now, any one of these individual earmarks may be quite reasonable, and many are made with the best intentions in mind," the secretary said. But in the aggregate, he contended, they have a sizeable -- and presumably negative -- effect on "the coherence of the programs."

The exchange reflected one of the few disagreements in a hearing on the 2003 budget -- what Lewis characterized as "the most important defense budget perhaps in our lifetime."

Rumsfeld, flanked at the witness table by Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Department Comptroller Dov Zakheim, said the department is faced with three simultaneous challenges: winning the worldwide war or terrorism; making delayed investments in procurement, personnel and modernization; and "transforming for the 21st Century."

"There are some who say this may be too much to ask -- that any one of these three challenges is daunting enough, but that tackling all three at once is impossible. It is not. We can do it," he said.

"And we must do it, because our adversaries are transforming," Rumsfeld continued. "They are studying how we were successfully attacked, how we are responding, and how we may be vulnerable in the future. We stand still at our peril," he warned.

Rumsfeld said the needed transformation effort revolves around six goals: protecting the U.S. homeland and overseas bases; projecting and sustaining power in distant theaters; protecting U.S. information networks from attack; using information technology to coordinate action by U.S. military forces; maintaining unhindered access to space, free from enemy attack; and denying enemies sanctuary.

Apparently with Osama bin Ladin and his al-Qaida terrorist network in mind, he said those enemies must be shown that "no corner of the world is remote enough, no mountain high enough, no cave or bunker deep enough, no SUV (sport utility vehicle) fast enough, to protect them from our reach."

Support for the department's proposed $379,000 million budget was widespread on the committee, which typically is highly solicitous of such defense requests.

Lewis noted that the proposal represents "a much-needed increase of $48,000 million over fiscal year 2002 levels.

"It is a good first step in providing the necessary resources to continue the war against terrorism and shape the military to deal with the new threats we face," he said.

But, seemingly signaling further congressional fine tuning, Lewis warned it is "imperative that budgetary priority be assigned to those systems that will enable our efforts to eradicate terrorism and transform the military to succeed, rather than funding programs that have nothing but bureaucratic inertia behind them."

Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the panel, also was broadly supportive of the department's budget proposal. "This is as good a budget as I've seen with th amount of money available," he told Rumsfeld.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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