Military Spending Raises Questions

An October 2002 classified briefing for congressional committees provided only general information, and Hobson's subcommittee kept pressing for what is known as Form 1391s: descriptions of individual projects that include line-item detail.

Pentagon officials provided congressional staffs with additional briefings on spending in the winter and spring of 2003, but congressional aides, who asked not to be named, said the details were still often spotty, even allowing for the need to safeguard the security of U.S. facilities and avoid political difficulties for Muslim governments providing secret support to the United States.

The wrangle continued into the spring of 2003, when Congress, over the strong objections of the Defense Department, added a provision to a new spending bill signed by Bush on April 16, 2003. It set a $150 million ceiling on the amount of funds that could be transferred to the Pentagon's "contingency" construction account and required seven-day advance notification of the reasons for the transfer.

The provision was backed by Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), who succeeded Hobson as chairman of the military construction panel in early 2002.

"Oversight is always needed," Knollenberg said. "We like to trust, but also verify."

Pentagon officials have continued to insist that the Defense Department adhered carefully to the letter of the law.

In its statement last week, the Pentagon said only one of the projects, with a value of $1.4 million, met the definition of a "military construction project" under the jurisdiction of the House subcommittee. That lone project was not started until Congress was notified of it in October 2002, it said.

The other construction projects, it added, involved "temporary facilities or facility improvements that did not meet the military construction criteria."

But Thomas Gavin, a spokesman for Sen. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, took issue with that. Gavin said 11 of the 21 projects qualified as military construction activities.

"The first time that the staff of the defense subcommittee saw that list was after the publication of Mr. Woodward's book," he said.

Gavin said an October 2002 classified briefing for congressional defense staffs covered "parts" of three of the 11 projects and a second briefing the following April covered an additional four.

"To the best of our knowledge, the administration failed to follow the law when it came to keeping the people's representatives fully informed on how they were spending these dollars," Gavin said.