Pork is making us less safe
The Washington Post reported yesterday some disturbing news regarding the $636 billion defense appropriation bill that just passed. Despite significant efforts by some lawmakers to bring some modicum of restraint to the appropriations process, the bill has emerged heavily laden with pork. It’s chock full of programs that the department of defense has said that it doesn’t need but that some representatives insist on including.
This comes after a significant victory against such pork barrel spending. There has been much discussion in the past couple weeks about the inclusion of over $1.75 billion to support an expansion of the F-22 program. As David Isenberg explained last week, this was a defense program that the DoD didn’t want. Rather, its congressional supporters in states where parts of the F-22 were manufactured lobbied hard to spend money on a weapon system that most experts agreed was a cold war relic that wasn’t particularly useful for today’s counterinsurgency conflicts. Thankfully, the Obama administration and most congressional representatives held strong against a concerted lobbying campaign to keep pouring money into this costly program.
This pork barrel spending has been the modus operandi of the defense industry and elected representatives for decades and in this case, it makes our country less safe. Money poured into big ticket acquisitions of questionable strategic value crowd out defense expenditures that are truly needed. It’s a bipartisan problem deep in need of a bipartisan solution.
Some examples of the pork being pushed:
House appropriators want to buy, for example, extra C-17 transport planes and F-18 jets, as well as four extra military jets used by lawmakers and Pentagon VIPs. And they want to keep alive a troubled missile-defense interceptor program and continue the troubled VH-71 presidential helicopter program.
Undoubtedly, in a world of limitless resources, these items could be useful. But that’s not the world in which we live. Every dollar spent on these items is a dollar not spent somewhere else. Certainly we could probably come up with a reasonable justification for every weapon system out there. There are countless threats out nation. Yet, every threat is not equally dangerous. So, it comes down to a question of prioritization. It seems to me that if the defense department says that we should be putting our dollars into other higher priority expenditures for the current conflicts at hand, that’s advice our elected representatives would be smart to heed.
I was particularly struck by Representative Murtha’s rationale for continuing the VH-71 helicopter program:
Murtha countered a week later that he was upset at the idea that the Pentagon would spend $3.2 billion on such a program and “get nothing out of it,” adding: “That’s unacceptable.”
Murtha has fallen for the “sunk cost fallacy“. Any businessman or economist will tell you that the $3.2 billion is a sunk cost. Decisions about future spending should not take sunk costs into account because they can never be recovered. Decisions should only take into account the merits of future spending. Although it’s painful to ignore past expenditures because we don’t want to “waste” money, if we’ve determined that the item is no longer needed, spending additional money on it is simply pouring money down the drain.
It’s time to call this pork what it is – foolish expenditures that make us less safe. Although no one wants to sacrifice jobs in the home district, it’s time that our elected representatives – both Democrats and Republicans – put our nation’s security first.
No related posts.
While it is true that the Defense Department operates on a fixed budget, in which funding for one weapons platform detracts from funding for another, the many of the items which you are discussing are appropriations bills. In other words they constitute funding for weapons platforms over and above the defense budget, and therefore do not play into the zero sum situation in the defense budget you are describing.
These items are bought from the larger federal budget which spends on items such as corporate bail outs and new health care programs. Therefore when assessing the value of these defense programs we must weigh their merits against such the programs which they will truly be detracting from, not set up a false dichotomy which seeks to state that the F-22 stops us from having more special forces. That simply is not the case. It would be more accurate to say spending on the F-22 may take funding from a new healthcare plan. And if that is the kind of discussion you want to have then that is fine, everyone has differing opinions on how much we should be spending on healthcare vs. defense. Perhaps, instead of claiming that defense platforms like missile defense are only desired by congressmen wanting to keep their seats by bringing jobs back home, we could have a debate about the merits of missile defense versus the merits of corporate bonuses for AIG. I’d bet that people might find missile defense, or F-22s more desirable if we framed the dichotomy in that way.
Comment on August 1, 2009 @ 1:36 pm