Making Incumbents Uneasy

s long as Arizona Sen. John McCain commands the bully pulpit of a serious presidential candidacy, the discomfort level on Capitol Hill will remain high.

It's bad enough that McCain has found a large megaphone through which to shout his campaign reform message on outlawing the massive infusions of corporate, labor and individual soft money that assure the reelection of so many congressional incumbents. In the 1998 election cycle, after all, $225 million in soft money backing for major party candidates helped 98 percent of the senators and representatives who sought reelection to remain in office.

But McCain, the former naval aviator whose credentials as a war hero and valiant prisoner of war allow him to speak with great authority on defense issues, also threatens a vastly larger and more venerable slush fund for the self-preservation of incumbents.

Though no dove when it comes to calling for higher military spending, McCain exults in blowing the whistle on what he sees as misplaced priorities in defense spending that have more to do with shoring up domestic political bases than with protecting America's shores from foreign enemies.

As he pursues his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, the Arizona maverick's eye-popping estimates of Pentagon pork amount to a second front in his crusade to attract support from an electorate that he believes already views the government with a considerable amount of distrust.

And when McCain talks about misspent defense dollars, he talks big numbers. By his calculation, 7 percent of this year's $289 billion Defense budget consists of politically self-serving waste. That comes to more than $20 billion. That's right, billions. Soft-money political donations pale by comparison.

Understandably, McCain's assertions that Congress regularly puts the welfare of big campaign donors and home state constituents ahead of national security interests drive colleagues on both sides of the aisle crazy. But his office's annual reviews of the Defense budget pull no punches in pinpointing three varieties of legislative interference and their breathtaking costs:

• Most expensive is Congress' refusal to close bases that are no longer needed by the military but still provide lots of jobs in the home states of key lawmakers. By McCain's count, this year the Pentagon is spending $7 billion to maintain "excess infrastructure" and is losing another $2 billion because of opposition to the privatization or consolidation of support and depot maintenance activities.
• Next--and best known--is the old-fashioned practice of approving funds for weapons systems that the Pentagon isn't asking for, but that hometown or home-state contractors are itching to build.
  McCain pegs the cost of such items in the current Defense budget at $6.4 billion.
• Finally, there is the propensity of elected politicians to seek the voters' gratitude by wrapping themselves in the red-white-and-blue bunting of protectionism. McCain argues that anti-competitive "Buy American" provisions inserted into the law cost the taxpayer $5.5 billion a year in defense contracting costs.

In refusing to vote for the Defense spending bill last year, McCain declared that it was "larded with earmarks and set-asides for powerful defense contractors, influential local interest groups and officials, and other parochial interests." He singled out such items as the LHD-8, an amphibious assault helicopter carrier to be built by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's hometown of Pascagoula, Miss. The Navy sought to defer the project until 2005, but Lott insisted that $375 million be budgeted to start building the vessel this year.

Speaking on the Senate floor, McCain railed against "pork-barrel spending that is inserted into spending bills for parochial reasons," noting that the LHD-8 had been the subject of "a disgraceful episode involving congressional intimidation of the Navy to add funding not programmed by the service."

McCain, as some critics suggest, could simply be grandstanding to attract attention to his quest for the Oval Office and garner the sympathy of the news media. But students of defense budgeting issues attach considerable credibility to the Arizona senator's analyses. They point out that other major studies in recent years have argued that the Pentagon could save $20 billion to $30 billion a year by improving the way it does business.

In fact, Steven Kosiak, of the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, notes that not all congressional add-ons are plainly visible. "The services are not stupid," he says. "They will include things in the budget that they may or may not want if they think an important congressman wants it. How do you figure out if that is pork?"

The one thing that is abundantly clear, however, is that there will be more than a few sighs of relief on Capitol Hill--from incumbents on both sides of the aisle--if presidential candidate McCain's moment in the limelight turns out to be short-lived.

Dick Kirschten is a contributing editor for National Journal.