Defense spending bill creates chem-bio research fund

Congress this week plans to approve the largest defense spending increase in a generation, earmarking billions of dollars toward combating weapons of mass destruction, including new research funding to establish a "Chem-Bio Defense Initiatives Fund."

House and Senate negotiators have reached final agreement on a $355.1 billion fiscal 2003 defense appropriations bill. The legislation was approved late last week by the full House of Representatives and is awaiting Senate passage this week before being sent to President Bush for his signature.

The legislation provides $7.4 billion for missile defense programs, $43 million less than the White House had requested, and represents the Bush administration's first formal attempt to develop new anti-missile technologies free of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The United States withdrew from the treaty in June.

One setback for the administration in the spending bill, however, was lawmakers' refusal to approve a $10 billion war contingency fund requested by the Pentagon to fund unforeseen expenses tallied up as part of the international war on terrorism.

Despite the difficulty in predicting the military's operational expenses between now and October 2003, legislators were unwilling to provide what some critics charged would be a blank check. Instead, the Pentagon will likely have to continue requesting emergency funds to cover unforeseen war expenses, officials said.

The legislation, however, marks widespread support across the government in substantially beefing up U.S. counterproliferation programs and developing a host of new technologies and defensive tools to address the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

House and Senate conferees, responsible for ironing out differences between the House and Senate versions of the defense appropriations bill, took the added step of establishing a new research fund, totaling $25 million, that gives the military a freer hand in researching novel technologies.

"The conferees agree to establish a "Chem-Bio Defense Initiatives Fund" within the Department of Defense's Chemical and Biological Defense program, and provide an increase of $25 million for this purpose," according to the conference report. "The secretary of Defense is directed to allocate these funds among the program proposals listed below in a manner which yields the greatest gain in our chem-bio defense posture."

Program proposals to be considered for the new research funds include a variety of efforts to enhance the Pentagon's ability to detect a chemical or biological attack and prevent harm to U.S. personnel.

In addition to these new funds, the defense spending bill allocates hundreds of millions of dollars in procurement and research and development funds to address the threat of weapons of mass destruction from a variety of approaches. For example, of the nearly $2 billion in applied research on what are called "defense-wide" programs, nearly half is earmarked for weapons of mass destruction-related efforts.

One technology in particular, a Pentagon proposal to develop a nuclear-tipped bunker buster weapon to defeat hardened and deeply buried targets such as biological weapons facilities, was provided with the requested $15.5 million. Lawmakers conditioned the money, however, on receiving a Bush administration report outlining how the funds would be used and whether there are conventional alternatives to a nuclear penetrator.

The legislation also earmarks nearly $1.5 billion for the Army to continue destroying the U.S. stockpile of chemical arms, as required under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Meanwhile, the bill calls on the Pentagon to provide a status report on the military's anthrax vaccination program, including the potential need for new production. The report should "assess the immediate and short-term preparedness and potential future total biowarfare defense need for the [Food and Drug Administration]-licensed anthrax vaccine, the potential need for expanded production capacity to meet that need, and the need for a separate production capacity to mitigate risks of an event which could result in a halt to current vaccine production."