Senate shifts funds from DoD to civilian agencies

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., sees a "flim flam" in a plan to take at least $12.5 billion out of the Senate Defense appropriations bill and award it to domestic programs to make those bills veto-proof, followed by restoration of the Pentagon's money through a fiscal 2000 emergency appropriation.

This "robbing of Peter to pay Paul", and then repaying Peter, has come under fire from Democrats, who call it a shell game driven by the Republican leadership's desire to avoid being blamed for breaking the spending caps agreed upon in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act.

In a closed meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee last week, Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said as much as $17 billion may have to come out of defense to sweeten non-defense programs.

So far, the committee's reallocation of FY2000 funds has hit up the Pentagon for $12.5 billion, with almost all of that amount going into the Labor-HHS bill.

Pentagon officials are anxiously tasting this guns-to-butter- and-back recipe, as well as the political stew over some of their most prized projects, including the Air Force F-22 fighter and the Navy LHD 8 amphibious ship for taking Marines and troop- carrying aircraft to distant trouble spots.

Stevens tried to sell House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., on the idea of continuing with the F-22 program, but financing its construction with research and development money rather than the $1.8 billion in production funds the Senate approved and the House rejected.

A Lewis counteroffer made over the weekend was rejected after the Air Force contended it had too many development checkpoints where the plane could be stopped, according to Pentagon officials.

House-Senate negotiations over the fighter plane, which will cost about $200 million each, continued Wednesday night amid predictions that a breakthrough was imminent.

As for the LHD 8, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., is insisting that the $1.5 billion craft be built sooner than the Navy's shipbuilding plan calls for.

He is pushing to put $500 million in the Pentagon's FY2000 appropriations for the LHD 8, which would be built in his home state shipyard, Ingalls of Pascagoula, Miss.

The Navy, because of competing demands for its shipbuilding money, wanted to wait until 2005 to start funding the LHD 8 in a major way.

"The Navy is caught between Lott and the Clinton administration," one defense official said of the LHD 8.

Lott is demanding that the Navy support his drive for LHD 8 money while the OMB is telling the ship-hungry service to resist the majority leader's tempting offer.