More Honesty and Integrity from the Bush Admin

The St. Petersburg Times (Florida) is reporting that the Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base falsly inflated their budget proposals to help hide $20 million the Pentagon wanted to ahve available, but didn't want Congress to know about.

The plan, according to defense officials and documents obtained by the Times, called for Special Operations to pad its proposed budget by $20-million so the money could be used later by the Pentagon for some other purpose. The Pentagon initially wanted Special Operations to hide $40-million. The Special Operations Command, which oversees the nation's secret commando units, refused.

It is unclear what the Pentagon intended to do with the $20-million, or what became of the money. Young surmised that the money could have been used as a contingency fund, available to Rumsfeld to use at his discretion. While $20-million is relatively modest in a Pentagon budget of almost $400-billion, Young said, if all the armed services are doing it the amount could grow significantly.

This is more than just an idle accusation, apparently, there are e-mail messages that back up the allegation.

The agreement between the Pentagon officials in Washington and Special Operations officials in Tampa is spelled out in an e-mail distributed by SoCom comptroller Elaine Kingston to colleagues on Feb. 11, 2002.

In the e-mail, Kingston wrote that she received a call from someone in the Pentagon comptroller's office. The caller, who is not identified in the e-mail, asked if the Special Operations Command could "park" $40-million of research and development money in its proposed budget for the 2003 fiscal year, which ends Tuesday.

"They needed an answer in 5 minutes," Kingston wrote. "The agency they had it parked with had a problem and couldn't do it."

Kingston wrote that "there was no way for us to park $40M." She wrote that she and Deborah Kiser, SoCom's investment appropriations budget chief, found six programs where they could add $20-million.

The programs listed in the e-mail include improvements to missile warning systems on Special Operations aircraft, infrared equipment on helicopters and radar systems. The $20-million was distributed in amounts as small as $2-million and as large as $5-million.

In her e-mail, Kingston coached colleagues on how to account for the additional money and avoid attracting attention to it in congressional briefings.

"I just wanted to follow up with an e-mail to ensure that the staffer briefing slides for these programs DO include these funds and that the briefer not highlight or discuss them during the staffer briefings," she wrote.

So, basically, the Pentagon wanted more money, but it didn't want to tell Congress what it wanted or why, so they asked MacDill Air Force Base's Special Operations Command to artificially inflate their budget request so that they would get $20 million more than they actually needed, and SOC would keep it on hand to give back to the Pentagon at their request.

It's unclear at this point how common of a practice it is for the Pentagon to "park" money at bases, or if any other bases were involved (though my personal guess would be that there may well be at least one more since the Pentagon wanted to part $40 million and MacDill SOC could only accomodate $20 million of that), but even if this is an isolated incidence, there's something fundamentally wrong about the Pentagon wanting to keep money hidden from Congress and an Air Force Base going along with it.

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Posted by thorswitch at September 28, 2003 09:58 PM | TrackBack