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Lugar bucks House earmark rule

journalgazette.net

Sylvia A Smith Washington editor

WASHINGTON – If the Pentagon had a fleet of trucks and vans that could generate electricity – not just consume fuel – U.S. bases would be shielded if the surrounding area were hit with a massive power outage.
That kind of vehicle doesn’t exist. Yet.

A Hoosier business is working on the technology that it says would fill a national security void: What happens if there’s a blackout in an area with a major military base and communications and other operations are frozen?

The hybrid trucks and vans under development by Bright Automotive in Anderson would be able to plug into the grid and generate power. In short, something that has always been a 100 percent user of power would become a source of electricity.

To Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., this is the kind of technology the country should invest in because it would enhance national security, save energy and reduce the reliance on foreign oil.
He’s asking Congress to allocate $10 million in next year’s budget to Flagship Enterprise Center, the non-profit business incubator that funnels federal money to Bright Automotive, a for-profit company.
The $10 million request – called an “earmark” – is the kind of no-bid contract that makes some budget-watchers shudder.

Earmarks for for-profit companies is “where the rubber meets the road on pay to play,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which advocates against all earmarks.
Ellis said businesses “can send thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, which can net them millions of dollars in earmark tax money.”

He’s not alone in criticizing earmarks designated for profit-making companies. President Obama has denounced them.

They are the “single most corrupting element of this practice, as witnessed by some of the indictments and convictions that we’ve already seen,” Obama said last year. “Private companies differ from the public entities that Americans rely on every day – schools and police stations and fire departments.”

The Democratic leadership of the House has nixed special funding allocations for for-profit businesses for next year. But the Senate did not adopt that approach.

Nearly two-thirds of the money for projects Lugar wants Congress to invest in for Indiana next year would go to private businesses.

The $84.9 million in public money he requested for projects at 17 companies is an investment in Indiana and particularly in the development of alternative energy, Lugar’s spokesman said.
Besides, Andy Fisher said, Lugar doesn’t think the source of all wisdom about how to spend tax money rests with the executive branch – no matter which political party the president belongs to.
In past years, Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, has requested millions of dollars for businesses in northeast Indiana.
Last year, for instance, he asked for $7.2 million for Raytheon to design a system that helps infantry troops launch precise rockets and minimize collateral damage; $3.5 million for Undersea Sensor Systems in Columbia City to develop upgraded Sonobuoys; $3 million for Alcoa’s Auburn factory to develop components that lessen the weight of armored Humvees and other heavy military vehicles; and $2.5 million for Parker Hannifin Corp. in New Haven to develop technology to more efficiently manage the heat produced in hybrid and all-electric vehicles.

Souder also regularly asks the subcommittee that writes the budget for the Defense Department to include more money for northeast Indiana-made military equipment than the Pentagon proposed.
Because of the House ban on earmarks for for-profit companies and House Republicans’ one-year moratorium on any earmarks, Souder won’t make similar requests for the 2011 budget.
But he thinks earmarks – both for private companies and public facilities – are an important thing for a member of Congress to support.

“Are we better off having the president earmark everything, or is there a role for Congress? I believe there is a role for Congress,” he said.

Besides, he said, there’s no purity in executive branch decision-making.

Military procurement officers in the Pentagon – the people who decide between competing military radios, vehicles or other equipment and determine how much to buy – are influenced by lobbyists, prior employers and colleagues who have left the government and now work for defense contractors, Souder said.
He said that’s not unlike the kind of influences members of Congress come under, “but it’s less open.”
In the past several years there’s been an increase in earmarks designated for private companies that do defense work.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drained Defense Department budgets that might have been used for development of new weapons systems, routine replacement of equipment and research.
“Even though the defense budgets went up a lot, they didn’t go up sufficiently to cover the escalation” of the costs of the wars, said Fred Downey, vice president of national security for the Aerospace Industry Association, a trade group that lobbies for the aerospace industry.

“You begin to have to make trade-offs,” he said. “You have to pay troops. You have to provide health care. You have to provide money to run the equipment, deploy the supplies. So where do you take it from? You take it from where the payout is much longer term – usually research and development and systems.”
Downey said instead of buying the 25 fighter jets it needs, the Pentagon budgets for 15. And that’s when members of Congress often step in.

The earmark lists include “an awful lot of (lawmaker) requests for high-technology stuff from small companies for things that, because of the budget pressures, often won’t make the Pentagon’s budget request,” he said.
“An anti-earmark policy such as the House has in mind,” Downey said, “would probably impact small high-tech innovative companies far more than larger established companies. That would be detrimental overall. If you look historically, it was not the Pentagon or the War Department that build aircraft carriers, that build nuclear submarines. It was Congress who directed those things be done despite what the military had requested. Some very important technologies and systems have come out of just that kind of patronage.”

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., abandoned earmark requests last year, citing runaway federal spending, and he extended that policy for the 2011 budget. The four Republican members of the House delegation are standing by the GOP one-year moratorium on all earmarks.

That leaves Lugar and five Democratic House members as the only Hoosiers asking that part of the federal budget be directed for projects in Indiana.

Lugar has asked for $134.3 million for various Hoosier projects, including the $84.9 million for defense-related research. Only a tiny portion of any lawmaker’s requests makes it through the process.
When Lugar evaluated the appeals for support for earmarks, Fisher said, he particularly focused on energy security.

But that’s an area that should be particularly open to competition, said Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
“That’s a huge market, alternative energy. It’s is one of the areas there’s a huge amount of capital investment going on around the country. Why, particularly for our men and women in uniform, wouldn’t we afford them to try to get the best technology at best price rather than it happens to be built in Indiana?” Ellis said.

In addition to the $10 million request for the vehicle being developed by Bright Automotive under the Flagship Enterprise Center’s umbrella, Lugar asked Congress to allocate $2.7 million to continue work on Navistar’s project for hybrid technology that can be converted to military vehicles; and $1.3 million to develop Zimmer’s dart gun that can be used to quickly set bones in battlefields.

Souder and Fisher pointed out that the earmarks approved by Congress do not add to the overall budget; the money is merely positioned in a way Congress wants and does not defer to the executive branch.
But when it comes to Defense Department spending, the Pentagon sees that as bad policy.
“Every dollar that we are forced to spend on things we do not need takes away dollars from things we do need,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in a briefing last fall. “And that, frankly, is a trade-off that is a loser for our troops and for the American taxpayer.”

But the amount of money claimed for earmarks – while billions of dollars – is still a tiny portion of the overall $3.5 trillion budget, budget analyst Stan Collender said.

“It’s almost so small as to not be worth anyone’s time. But earmarks have never been about the number. They’ve been about appearances and politics,” he said.

In recent years, earmarks have received considerable attention and produced a lengthy investigation into lawmakers who were accused by a watchdog group of trading earmarks for campaign contributions.
The House ethics committee cleared seven lawmakers, including Hoosier Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-1st, in February.

The ethics committee said there is a widespread perception among lobbyists and campaign donors that giving money to a congressional re-election campaign will get them more access to the lawmaker or improve the chances of winning an earmark.

But it said Visclosky and the six others who were under investigation “take great care to separate their official and campaign functions, particularly with respect to earmark requests.”

Ten days after the ethics committee’s exoneration of the seven lawmakers, House leaders said there would be no earmarks in the 2011 budget for private companies.

The action, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “limits the influence of lobbyists on members of Congress.”
Collender said the most telling factor of earmarks is that few members of Congress request them for projects outside their states or districts.
sylviasmith@jg.net