Forward Observer: Overdue Oversight

Medical bulletin: Congress shows flickering signs of breaking out of its coma and performing at least some oversight of Pentagon programs.

Evidence of these new stirrings came over the last several days as both the House and Senate Armed Services committees said enough already and cut money from unproven weapons. President Bush's prized missile defense program, the Army's gee-whiz Future Combat System of interconnected armored vans and the Pentagon's do-everything-for-everybody F-35 Joint Strike Fighter all found themselves on the congressional hit list despite Republican control on Capitol Hill.

Iraq, the lame duck president's falling public approval ratings, heartburn over Bush sending Congress scantily documented requests for emergency money to finance his wars, the assault of retired generals against Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and an escalating feeling of alarm that Pentagon procurement is out of control, are being cited for Congress's partial awakening to its oversight responsibilities.

House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member John Murtha, D-Pa., who broke with Bush on Iraq months ago and called for withdrawal of U.S. troops, told me, for example, that crowd receptions and e-mails tell him that the American people are on his side of the issue, not the president's.

"As I go around," Murtha said, "I get a standing ovation as I walk in the place" to speak. "That's before I've said anything. Then I get another standing ovation after my speech."

Right now Murtha and other members of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee are sifting through Rumsfeld's fiscal 2007 budget and emergency money request. In doing this, Murtha told me, he found another reason Bush should fire Rumsfeld.

Murtha said he discovered that military leaders had not been consulted by Rumsfeld's office to discuss several important budget issues. The disconnect between Rumsfeld and military leaders in today's Pentagon "is the worst I've ever seen," said the lawmaker, who has been in the House since 1974.

The subcommittee has been forced to "deal directly" with the military in assessing the budget requests, Murtha said, bypassing Rumsfeld's civilian directorate. "He's got to go," said Murtha of Rumsfeld.

But how can the commander-in-chief fire Rumsfeld without acknowledging in that act that his own policies in Iraq have failed? Bush either fires Rumsfeld before the midterm congressional elections this November "or loses 50 House seats," Murtha replied.

Republicans might well dismiss that grim choice as an act of wishful thinking by one Democratic critic. But recent challenges by both Democrats and Republicans to some of the president's key military programs do, indeed, testify to the fact that Bush has lost some of the Teflon political coating that 9/11 gave him.

No longer is Congress willing to show blind faith in weapons that have not proved worth buying. Examples: The hawkish House Armed Services Committee, in marking up its FY07 defense authorization bill before approving it last Thursday, cut $183.5 million from the Pentagon's request for missile defense and fenced off another $200 million until interceptors in California and Alaska showed that they could hit an incoming warhead.

The committee also cut $326 million from the Army's troubled Future Combat System. Critics contend the FCS is neither fish nor fowl: not really small and light enough to be airlifted easily, yet too thin-skinned to survive against high explosives on tomorrow's battlefields.

The committee said it was concerned about the escalating costs of the FCS. It called for the Pentagon's Defense Acquisition Board to take a fresh look at this futuristic program, stressing in making the demand that there must be a balance in dividing up defense dollars between the military needs of today and tomorrow.

Behind closed doors last week, Senate Armed Services Airland Subcommittee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., persuaded a majority of colleagues on the Senate Armed Services panel to hold back money needed to start production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter until further tests demonstrate that such a big step was justified. Who knows? That old and sensible fly-before-buy policy in this world where nobody threatens the fighter planes we already have in the air might be making a comeback.

Granted, Congress is far from being all the way out of its coma regarding oversight. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., had it right Thursday, when he told his colleagues on the House floor that "we have an obligation as a separate branch of government to do our oversight, to get the facts, to ask the hard questions."

Van Hollen complained that this Congress has not been doing that, citing as an example the failure of the House Judiciary Committee to hold "a single hearing" on the National Security Agency's wiretapping of United States citizens without a warrant.

And certainly an administration that intends to spend more than a half a trillion dollars on defense this year and again next needs more oversight than Congress has been giving it.

But we can hope the scattered challenges Congress just started making to Bush's defense programs will take root and grow.