Government Executive - Authors - Winslow T. Wheeler

Here’s how to fix the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office

Winslow T. Wheeler — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 06:00:00 -0400

When the House Armed Services Committee reported its massive 2024 National Defense Authorization Act by an overwhelming 58 to 1 vote, it adopted a quick, simple solution to a research problem. The Pentagon’s Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, or CAPE, had failed to endorse the congressionally mandated plan of building more amphibious warships on a quicker schedule for the Marines, something President Biden’s fiscal 2024 defense budget request had also eschewed. The House committee’s solution: abolish the agency, fire its director, and give the work to someone else, presumably more servile to the committee, in another Pentagon office.

It’s a bit awkward for a congressional committee to reach across to a separate but equal branch of government to tell people what to think, but the abolition is a recommendation that the House Armed Services Committee can make stick, given Congress’ exclusive constitutional control of funding—if the rest of the House and the Senate agree.

Instead, others in Congress should reject the House Committee’s arrogance and instead fundamentally revitalize CAPE, which—in truth—has not distinguished itself with the kind of work that continuing, even deepening, Pentagon pathologies demand. As discussed below, the fixes must go to the heart of the operation, involving the people and bureaucratic status—perhaps even location—of CAPE.

In the past, firing people and abolishing agencies for thinking what lawmakers in power believe is the wrong thing was a time-honored congressional reaction to unwanted research. In 1995, Congress abolished its own Office of Technology Assessment as one of Newt Gingrich’s so-called reforms of congressional spending.

Not coincidentally, the technology assessment office had failed to match the enthusiasm of most Republicans for a national missile defense. Not long after that, as Sen. Pete Domenici’s, R-N.M., national security analyst on the Senate Budget Committee, I was tasked to resolve a request in a letter from several Republican senators to fire a team of analysts at the Congressional Budget Office who had assessed the cost of a national missile defense significantly higher than the advocates wanted to admit to. As chairman of the Budget Committee, Domenici was in a position to make life miserable for CBO if it did not comply. To his credit, Domenici refused, even though he supported the missile defense. He knew that making CBO the plaything of congressional whims would mean the death of CBO’s credibility.

However, the problem at CAPE goes beyond the House Armed Services Committee’s crude behavior. CAPE was created by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Carl Levin, D-Mich., in the 2009 Weapon System Acquisition Reform Act to replace the previous Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. PA&E, as it was called, had a mixed record. Under some of its directors and managers, such as Russell Murray and Thomas Christie, in the 1970s and 80s, it had a reputation for extraordinary work. But there was no serious objection to its being reorganized into CAPE as its work had declined from the office’s heyday and clearly needed revitalization. Unfortunately, no revival took place. As revealed in a 2018 RAND study, CAPE’s cost analysis was methodologically weak and persistently wrong. The organization was never the center of the badly needed, rigorous analysis of Pentagon problems that had sometimes characterized the earlier PA&E. Note, for instance, the absence of a single example of compelling analysis in a commentary by some former directors of CAPE arguing against the HASC’s recommended abolition.

Some in the Senate Armed Services Committee have serious concerns about the nature and quality of CAPE’s work. These apprehensions are described in the press as a need to “tweak” the organization, perhaps to create in it a “Competitive Analysis Cell” to provoke superior work.

The need to fix CAPE should be obvious. The question is, how?

As an assistant director in GAO’s Program Evaluation and Methodology Division, or PEMD, I had the privilege of working in an organization that had the characteristics that those interested to revitalize CAPE should foster there. Guided by an incisive and habitually frank director Eleanor Chelimsky, PEMD specialized in how to design breakthrough evaluations and then went on to perform them. In PEMD’s defense section, we executed work that others in GAO said could not be done, and once we did it, our GAO critics said our work couldn’t be right, because the Pentagon didn’t like it. When our comprehensive evaluation of the air war in Desert Storm used a unique data-based synthesis to prove the performance of many high-cost aircraft and munitions was preposterously overstated, our GAO critics argued that the proof against us was that Air Force officials told them we were wrong. The data the Air Force itself had collected, scores of pilots from the war, and hundreds of after-action and other reports all said otherwise.

Those GAO critics rarely ventured beyond a pathetically weak “this is what officials told us” methodology, and they always tolerated the Pentagon’s selective release of documents to them. To do otherwise would foster unhappy “relations with the agency,” they argued: a revealing proposition

Happily, in my opinion, more recent GAO work has shown some improvement.

The primary lessons of this history are that for better analysis of cost and programs you must have:

● Aggressive and fearless leadership dedicated to the proposition that staff are expected to peel the onion of the research object down to the inner core. And they should expect support from management when others try to obstruct that work in any way;

● Unrestrained organizational independence to deny others the opportunity to filter, alter, or squelch research. This includes access to all relevant documentation and outside advice and assistance, when needed, to fully achieve selected evaluation objectives, as well as the right to distribute the completed research to all relevant parties, and;

● A highly trained professional staff that has demonstrated real evaluation or auditing skill and is free of affiliations that could compromise work. This means staff who do not have an interest, expressed or implied, toward defense corporations, and who will not be compromised by a current or future professional affiliation. This would mean that an active-duty member of a military service might be inappropriate to assess a program of his/her own service, but evaluating another service’s program might be an effective use of expertise. It could also mean that a retired military expert is preferable to an active-duty one.

Others may have other important suggestions for effective, uncompromised, independent research. If parts of the existing CAPE organization—from the bottom to top—cannot epitomize these characteristics, the need for real change should be obvious. Legislative directives to “tweak” CAPE should have these characteristics very much in mind. If the Pentagon won’t fully cooperate with a CAPE remake, the Senate Armed Services Committee “tweakers” may want to consider moving the cost analysis and program evaluation function to a newly created division in GAO or some other fully independent construct.

There is a caveat, however. Even exemplary leadership with an extraordinary staff and unfettered evaluation power are not a guarantee of ultimate success. PEMD had a long record of making bureaucratic enemies inside GAO by telling other divisions their work was inferior and by doing far better. They struck back. First, our director was fired, and when her successors proved equally supportive of work others did not want done, GAO management abolished the division.

The House Armed Services Committee campaign to punish CAPE for being insufficiently servile is congressional crudeness and arrogance at their worst. However, the work in the Senate to “tweak” CAPE into being a more successful and independent voice for uncompromised research is to be praised. The road to that end is not an easy one, and there is no guarantee that there will not be dead evaluation bodies at the end of the street. But it is an important journey nonetheless.

Winslow Wheeler was an evaluator then assistant director in GAO for nine years. In addition, he spent 22 years working for Republican and Democratic senators and then 13 years at the Center for Defense Information, ultimately as director.

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Truth & Consequences

Winslow T. Wheeler and Marion C. Blakely — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The cuts would devastate the economy and jeopardize a generation of innovation.

By Marion C. Blakey

Sometimes it takes a looming deadline to force us to accomplish the enormous tasks we’ve put off for months. We do our taxes on April 14 and pull all-nighters on the eve of our biggest exams.

Congress is no different. But the consequences of failing to reach an agreement on national budget priorities are much higher. Unemployment benefits expired four times in the past two years before Congress voted to renew them. Two thousand transportation workers were furloughed and 41 projects halted when Congress missed a deadline to renew the Federal Aviation Administration budget. And a super committee of 12 hand-picked members of Congress failed to meet a November 2011 deadline to agree on $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, per the Budget Control Act.

Now Congress is facing the fallout from punting on these cuts and the consequences are severe. The process known as sequestration will slash funding for defense, space, aviation and other domestic accounts by more than $1 trillion. Added to last year’s debt ceiling cuts, the total is more than $2 trillion in spending cuts.

An overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress oppose these deep, across-the-board cuts. They agree it would be better to implement strategic, bipartisan budget reductions. But Congress is again procrastinating. Sequestration doesn’t technically kick in until Jan. 2, 2013, and many seem resigned to leaving the matter for the post-election lame duck session, or even until 2013.

Sequestration is not a fictional monster under Congress’ bed—it’s the law on the books. As such, budget planners and companies that deal with the government don’t have the luxury of pretending it doesn’t exist. Programs are being slowed and scaled back to prepare for sequestration.

The 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires contractors to inform workers 60 days or more in advance of layoffs. So hundreds of thousands of these notices could be sent in October and November, due to the widespread layoffs sequestration will demand come January.

These are just the first signs of the storm to come: the green cast in the air, the darkening of the sky. In 2013 alone, the Defense Department faces a $100 billion cut, and according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, that could slash every program by 23 percent. That would threaten all shipbuilding and base construction projects, since you can’t build three-quarters of a boat or a building. The military services will have to reduce orders for other equipment by one-third or more, driving up unit costs. Panetta predicts the budget cuts will disrupt the ongoing mission in Afghanistan.

The 2013 cuts also would slash NASA funding by nearly 10 percent. That would make it incredibly difficult to fund our most essential space priorities such as the James Webb Space Telescope, International Space Station and the new Space Launch System without completely ending all other NASA programs.

The annual budget for the Next Generation Air Transportation System, the air traffic control modernization effort known as NextGen, would face cuts of 30 percent to 50 percent in 2013. Experts predict that, if implemented, NextGen would deliver efficiencies and savings of $40 billion annually. So delaying this project only worsens our budget problems.

And that’s just year one. During the next decade, defense funding would fall to the lowest level since World War II. Without enough fighters to staff the decks of our aircraft carriers, our military couldn’t execute President Obama’s East Asia strategy, or protect maritime shipping routes in the Middle East. Without enough reconnaissance drones and satellites, we’d be unable to track terrorists in Yemen and Afghanistan while also monitoring the ongoing nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran. The United States truly could be reduced to a regional power.

On the space front, sequestration could mean that America sits on the sidelines while the Russians cement their lead in space taxi services and tighten their grip on both government and commercial markets. And we could very well relive our sputnik moment if Chinese astronauts beat us back to the moon—NASA’s own mission just a few years ago.

Delaying the NextGen digital upgrade could turn the United States into an aviation backwater. Experts predict passenger air traffic will double in the next 10 years while cargo traffic could triple. Our current system, dating to the 1960s, cannot support these additional demands.

As these aerospace and defense capabilities wither under the poison of sequestration, so will the industry that makes them possible. Roughly 1 million workers could lose their jobs because of cuts to the defense budget alone, according to Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason University. The Pentagon estimates the cuts could raise the unemployment rate by an entire percentage point. And the Bipartisan Policy Center estimates these cuts, in combination with tax increases, could reduce the United States’ gross domestic product by half a percentage point, causing a significant and ill-timed drag on our economy.

Smaller companies will have to shutter their doors forever, after selling or scrapping their tools. Once these companies have vanished, we won’t be able to easily re-create them. We’re facing the largest downsizing of our aerospace and defense industry since the end of the Cold War. We could lose an entire generation of innovation.

Sequestration is effectively a policy of retreat, yet other nations are moving forward farther and faster than ever. China is building an aircraft carrier fleet and developing a fifth-generation stealth fighter jet. Russia is investing the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in the biggest military buildup since the collapse of the Soviet Union. North Korea and Iran are developing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And as they do so, they’re also establishing a defense industrial base that will enable them to build even more fearsome weapons in the future.

America’s military and aerospace industry is second to none. The industry supports more than 3.5 million jobs; generates more than 2 percent of the U.S. GDP; and ranks as America’s strongest manufacturing exporter, selling $90 billion annually in goods abroad.

But we got this way because we braved great missions, dared to do great things and did the impossible under the shortest of deadlines—because we have been unwilling to retreat.

Most members of Congress want to avoid the doomsday blow that sequestration would present. I believe Congress will rise to the challenge and demonstrate why America is and always will remain truly second to none.

Marion C. Blakey is president and chief executive officer of the Aerospace Industries Association. The cuts won’t be disastrous, but their mindless application could be avoided.

By Winslow T. Wheeler

Pentagon budget watchers are fixated on Jan. 2, 2013. Because the congressional super committee in 2011 failed to secure a broad budget deal, the “trigger” enacted with the Budget Control Act automatically will remove $1.2 trillion from federal spending—apportioned unequally between discretionary and mandatory spending and payments on the national debt. A large portion of those automatic cuts will hit the Pentagon; as a result, the misinformation, hysteria and politicking from defense spending boosters are dominating the media.

The noise about sequestering defense funds is the embodiment of the dysfunction in Washington. Both Republicans and Democrats have declared themselves in a state of near-panic about it and most have a plan, which conveniently advances their own agenda to the exclusion of anyone else’s.

Some say a lame duck Congress following the elections will find the common ground to undo the sequestration requirement. That would require today’s horde of finger-pointers to look beyond self-indulgence. Good luck with that.

The irony is one of the few unifying beliefs in Washington— that the Defense Department must be protected from sequester—is quite misinformed. The plaything of politicians, data are not used to bridge differences; they are used to widen them, and when information suggests an outcome that is undesired or outside conventional wisdom, it is ignored.

The representations on the defense sequester are classic examples. The scope of cuts Defense faces is routinely misreported: The Congressional Budget Office repeatedly has testified the sequester would cause the defense budget to lose $492 billion over nine years, but as late as June some were saying the long-term Pentagon cuts would be $600 billion. CBO further explains that sequester would impose a $55 billion reduction in 2013; others say it would be $60 billion; still others say more. It all depends on which baseline you start with: the one set by the Budget Control Act; the larger amount of the Obama defense budget request for 2013; or the amount House Republicans are pressing for.

It gets wild when Washington debates percentages. Using various assumptions—some of them plausible, others not—two different think tanks reported that sequestration would impose 15 percent or 7.5 percent reductions on defense in 2013. CBO says 10 percent; the Congressional Research Service says 11.5 percent. By including or excluding accounts the law may or may not require to be subject to sequester, analysts change the denominator to arrive at the “indefensible” 15 percent cut, or the less intimidating 7.5 percent cut.

As the politicians pursue their agendas, they ignore important realities.

CBO reports sequester will reduce the base part of the defense budget (defense spending minus most of the costs of war) to $491 billion in 2013, and it will be supplemented by additional war spending in the overseas contingency operations account. The amount to be in the latter currently is unknown, but it may be roughly 10 percent lower than the $88.5 billion President Obama requested, or if gimmicks now being contemplated are employed, there could be an increase.

One defense budget analyst concluded that sequestration would return the base Pentagon budget to its 2007 level of spending, adjusted for inflation. The Congressional Research Service found it would return national defense spending to just under the 2005 level; CBO says 2006. In any case, spending for the Pentagon would be—historically—quite generous. The levels are more than $30 billion above average Cold War era spending, and they are about $100 billion above the previous lows following other big defense spending periods—the Korean and Vietnam wars and the Reagan era. If the overseas contingency operations account is included, the spread is larger.

Seen from the perspective of what other, potentially unfriendly countries spend on defense, the United States would remain a giant among unequals. The United States spends more than twice what China, Russia, Syria, Iran and North Korea—combined—spend on defense.

Nonetheless, there are challenges: namely, the abrupt one-year decline from 2012 to 2013, made more problematic by the mindless way sequester threatens to cut. The problems are not insurmountable. First, the president, whoever he may be in January, will have to resist the shibboleth that only more money can “fix” the Defense Department.

Next, relief is needed from the mindless cutting. While most point to statutes that seem an ironclad mandate to cut automatic and equal amounts in every program, project and activity in accounts subject to sequester, others have pointed to authorities that the president can exercise to obviate the across-all-boards nature of the cutting. The speculation is not idle; OMB has the sole authority to interpret the Budget Control Act. There have been rumors of closeted discussions and some offhand remarks that suggest the actual sequester could be something very different from what everyone expects. By exploiting any such authority and the clever budgetary legerdemain that OMB uses when it wants, the president should make the mindless into something rational.

To achieve the abrupt $55 billion drawdown in one short year, the focus should be on hardware and contracted services. The acquisition budget is stuffed with systems still in their initial testing. Termed “acquisition malpractice” by Defense’s top acquisition official, this politically driven—buy it before you fly it—routine should be terminated immediately by suspending production of all hardware programs that have not completed at least initial operational testing. (Precisely how some of our most successful programs were acquired in the past.) While there would be termination costs, such a move could immediately save billions. For example, the outrageous F-35 program alone could cough up almost $6 billion in suspended procurement in 2013 and more in subsequent years.

Similarly, there are rich savings to be found in immediately suspending, if not terminating, contracting in 2013 for services that should be provided by government employees. There is a gigantic domain of more than $200 billion in total contracted services to select from.

There are other ways the abrupt one-year drawdown can be eased. For example, if Congress were willing—briefly—to incrementally fund projects being preserved, rather than pay all future years’ costs upfront. There are other gimmicks; it would be a pleasant change to use them to save money rather than to squander it.

We are confronted with a panicked mentality from people who believe a historically fulsome Defense budget is somehow “doomsday.” If we have a president in January 2013 worth electing, he will force them to think again. If we don’t, the day of reckoning only will have been delayed.

Winslow T. Wheeler is director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. ]]>

Staffing Rules With a Twist

Winslow T. Wheeler — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Lawmakers slam DoD personnel plan, but it's a chip off the old block.

hings are rarely what they seem on Capitol Hill. A classic example is the debate over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's proposal to change the personnel management rules for 734,000 civilian employees at the Defense Department. Rumsfeld wants staffing flexibilities similar to the ones Congress has granted itself, but many senators and representatives are in a big lather about his ideas. Having worked in both the civil service system and on Capitol Hill during the last 31 years, I find much irony in the controversy. The greatest irony of all is that Rumsfeld's critics are right; the staffing rules on Capitol Hill are an atrocious model for Defense.

Rumsfeld wants to be able to hire, fire, promote, and transfer employees quickly, to increase pay based on performance, and to simplify negotiations with unions. He told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in May, "We simply aren't cutting it" in the modern age with the "industrial era" civil service system.

Rumsfeld deserves a lot of sympathy. For years, I worked under the old civil service rules at the General Accounting Office. It took months to hire people and years to fire even the most indolent. Everyone collected predestined pay increases regardless of merit. The workday was filled with mind-numbing paperwork, and anything longer than an eight-hour day was cause for audible groaning.

Congress imposed this bureaucratic nightmare on federal managers for good reason. Civil service rules make it tricky for patronage, nepotism, political bias, personal favoritism and gross incompetence to rule the federal staffing roost.

Lawmakers say they are distressed that Defense employees should be transformed to the base hirelings of the pre-civil service era. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said at a House Government Reform and Oversight hearing in April that Rumsfeld's plan would "strip 700,000 employees of the Defense Department of some of their most basic rights, such as the right to notice before they are fired and the right to join a union." Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., warned in a statement to the news media in May, of the "natural temptation for future Department of Defense officials to reward loyalty over quality of performance and provide pay and promotions to those who tell senior officials what they want to hear." Even some Republicans took a shot. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, criticized the lack of whistleblower protection.

The truth is that members of Congress love Rumsfeld's staff management ideas.

The system on Capitol Hill has all the characteristics Rumsfeld wants. Hiring, firing and transfers can be instantaneous, and pay raises are strictly meritorious. If a senator likes the cut of your jib when you visit his office, he can tell you to go straight to the Senate Disbursing Office to be sworn in and start work on his staff the next pay period. If the senator's payroll is maxed out, he can boot anyone to make room for you.

Patronage? Next time you are in one of the House office buildings, ask the person operating the fully automatic elevator how he or she got the job. Political bias? Check out how many registered Democrats Republican Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has on his staff and how many Republicans Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California has on hers. Nepotism? Next time you visit a senator or representative's office, note any coincidences in the member's and staffers' last names. There are no civil service protections on Capitol Hill.

The system is designed to ensure a staff that is eager to please the boss. Saying things a senator doesn't want to hear isn't exactly a career enhancing activity. One way to really test the senator's patience is to write an essay criticizing him and his colleagues. It can end a Hill career; trust me.

Some believe the Hill reformed itself in 1995 when it passed the Congressional Accountability Act to end its exemptions from civil service rules. Congress even set up an Office of Compliance to enforce the new rules. But it all was a sham. Congress carefully forgot to end its self-exemption from the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act. The Office of Compliance said in its 2002 annual report that when some Hill employers find out an employee has initiated a complaint, the real harassment starts. Because of this open season of "intimidation and reprisal," the report concluded, the protections Congress legislated are "illusory."

Compared with members of Congress, Rumsfeld is a fumbling novice at fostering apple-polishing. And yet, lawmakers are right to criticize his plan. National security issues need better than the likes of the handiwork on Capitol Hill.

Surely, there is a solution for Defense besides the bureaucratic clog of civil service rules and the political claptrap of Capitol Hill. A good start is Voinovich's idea to add whistleblower protections to Rumsfeld's proposal, but that's not enough. The Merit System Protection Board needs expanded powers and more aggressive leadership to quash Pentagon managers who think their staff's job is to please them. While Voinovich is at it, he should propose whistleblower protection on Capitol Hill. The forthright senators would support him.

Winslow T. Wheeler, a visiting senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, spent 31 years working for four senators from both parties and for the General Accounting Office. In 2002, he left the Senate Budget Committee after senators complained about his essay criticizing Congress' handling of defense legislation in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.

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History lesson

Winslow T. Wheeler — Tue, 15 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Victory in future wars is often a function of learning from the one just fought. In 1944, President Roosevelt learned from France's failure to learn from its victory in 1918 and told his secretary of war, "It would be valuable . . . for postwar planning to obtain an impartial and expert study of the effects of the aerial attack on Germany." The result was the 1946 "United States Strategic Bomb Survey," by such scholars as Paul Nitze and John Kenneth Galbraith, which had a profound effect on the U.S. military.

After the first Persian Gulf War, Franklin C. Spinney cited Roosevelt's missive in a March 1991 Newsday commentary recommending a study of Operation Desert Storm.

Spinney, described in the news media as a "Pentagon maverick," argued that the world was again changing and that the U.S. military needed another thorough and impartial evaluation to chart defense planning. He suggested that the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences lead the analysis.

No such study resulted.

Air Force Secretary Donald Rice commissioned a "Gulf War Air Power Survey" in 1991, but when its findings failed to conform to Air Force dogma, he limited printing to just 500 copies. In April 1992, the Defense Department produced its official "Conduct of the Persian Gulf War," but the study was thinly disguised self-promotion. Several books were written about the conflict, but none of the authors had access to critical Defense Department data, which remained classified.

In the absence of readily available, comprehensive information, a public image of the first Gulf War emerged. It all added up, most agreed, to the supremacy of American high-tech weapon systems and a revolution in warfare.

It also was garbage.

The report was "Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air Campaign," which I produced along with four smart, tough colleagues at GAO. Not only did we win access to virtually all of the Defense Department's relevant data, but military officials were unsuccessful in manipulating the results. The report is crammed with information the myth-makers of Desert Storm never wanted anyone to know:

On the first night of the war, F-117s successfully destroyed just two, maybe three, of the military's 15 air defense targets. By day five, Air Force Intelligence assessed those defenses as being "down, but not out."
About half the Tomahawk missiles launched "failed to arrive at their intended targets."
Instead of "one target, one bomb," successful attacks against bridges, for example, required an average of 10 bombs-all of them precision-guided.

In the new, 2003 war against Iraq, some people seemed taken aback by events that should not have surprised them. As many as several hundred innocent civilians may have been killed by U.S. precision-guided munitions. This seemed to shock some U.S. journalists; others nodded knowingly as Defense spokespeople explained that these weapons go wrong only on the rarest occasions and that maybe Saddam's weapons did the damage. Scores of American soldiers were killed not by Saddam's over-touted Republican Guard and Iraq's best weapons, but by poorly trained fanatics with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers designed in the 1940s. The news media and the U.S. command were caught flatfooted.

Today, we are setting ourselves up for a replay. The hucksters of various technological wares are selling the same snake oil we saw immediately after Desert Storm:

Air power, especially stealth, decimated the Republican Guard.
This war had fewer civilian casualties than any comparable one in history.
In response to mid-war critics who called for more "boots on the ground," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "Never have so many been so wrong about so much."

The "Rumsfeld Doctrine" is now being proclaimed as the model for the future even before this war is understood. If his doctrine flops the next time around, Rumsfeld will be the goat, not the acclaimed Caesar.
We need a thoroughly independent comprehensive analysis of this war from a collection of nonpartisan, unbiased scholars, evaluators and experts. Rumsfeld should be begging for it. He could be sorry if he doesn't.

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Heed the Lessons, Not the Lies

Winslow T. Wheeler — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

ictory in future wars is often a function of learning from the one just fought. In 1944, President Roosevelt learned from France's failure to learn from its victory in 1918 and told his secretary of war, "It would be valuable . . . for postwar planning to obtain an impartial and expert study of the effects of the aerial attack on Germany." The result was the 1946 "United States Strategic Bomb Survey," by such scholars as Paul Nitze and John Kenneth Galbraith, which had a profound effect on the U.S. military.
After the first Persian Gulf War, Franklin C. Spinney cited Roosevelt's missive in a March 1991 Newsday commentary recommending a study of Operation Desert Storm.

No such study resulted.

It also was garbage.

In 1997, the General Accounting Office released a 235-page study. It had none of the eminence of the fabled "United States Strategic Bomb Survey," none of the authority of an official Defense Department study, not even the selling point of an effort to censor it. But it did have data.
The report was "Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air Campaign," which I produced along with four smart, tough colleagues at GAO. Not only did we win access to virtually all of the Defense Department's relevant data, but military officials were unsuccessful in manipulating the results. The report is crammed with information the myth-makers of Desert Storm never wanted anyone to know:

On the first night of the war, F-117s successfully destroyed just two, maybe three, of the military's 15 air defense targets. By day five, Air Force Intelligence assessed those defenses as being "down, but not out."
About half the Tomahawk missiles launched "failed to arrive at their intended targets."
Instead of "one target, one bomb," successful attacks against bridges, for example, required an average of 10 bombs-all of them precision-guided.

Today, we are setting ourselves up for a replay. The hucksters of various technological wares are selling the same snake oil we saw immediately after Desert Storm:

Air power, especially stealth, decimated the Republican Guard.
This war had fewer civilian casualties than any comparable one in history.
In response to mid-war critics who called for more "boots on the ground," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "Never have so many been so wrong about so much."

Rumsfeld should not be leading the gloating. He should be reviewing lessons from the past, quietly noting who are today's loudest data-free prognosticators and demanding answers to unsolved operational problems such as friendly fire. Indeed, Rumsfeld has more to lose than anyone. The "Rumsfeld Doctrine" is now being proclaimed as the model for the future even before this war is understood. If his doctrine flops the next time around, Rumsfeld will be the goat, not the acclaimed Caesar.

We need a thoroughly independent comprehensive analysis of this war from a collection of nonpartisan, unbiased scholars, evaluators and experts. Rumsfeld should be begging for it. He could be sorry if he doesn't.

Winslow T. Wheeler is a visiting senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information. Wheeler spent 31 years working for four senators from both political parties and for the General Accounting Office, where he directed "Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air Campaign."

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Oversight overlooked

Winslow T. Wheeler — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400

The four senators I worked for taught me that the most important thing I could do as a national security staffer was to help them with their oversight responsibilities. That is, to find out what was really going on in the Defense Department behind the gloss of official testimony, the military services' sleek budget brochures, and officers' slick briefings on supposedly flawless weapon systems. That way, my bosses could ask the kind of questions at committee hearings that would prompt Defense witnesses to glance back at their staff for help and promise to provide complete answers-just as soon as they found out themselves.

On Feb. 13, I attended a Senate Armed Services Committee oversight hearing where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified. Rumors were rife that day that war with Iraq was imminent. In that atmosphere, you'd think the oversight afterburners would be lit and the committee would be doing all kinds of things to find and address soft spots in our defenses that Pentagon officials had failed to address.

Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., kicked off the hearing at 9:35 a.m., declaring that American troops deserve Congress' support in the war, "and they will get it." Although Defense had not yet requested a penny for transport, ammunition or anything else for the war, he turned to the Navy shipbuilding budget, which, he said, "is increasing, but not as much as we would like to see it." War might have been looming, but the shipyard back home in Newport News, Va., needed even more dollars.

Then the committee's senior Democrat, Carl Levin, D-Mich., complained that the White House had misinformed him about how much information the CIA had given United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq. A real issue, but these witnesses were from Defense, not the CIA or the White House.

Warner responded with a budget initiative-not for the war, but for the Armed Services Committee. Warner wanted the senators to OK the committee's budget for travel, hearings and staffers' pay.

At 9:56 a.m., it was Rumsfeld's turn. It took him 22 minutes to read his statement. Most of the senators weren't listening. Instead, they talked with each other or read what appeared to be their staffers' memos to figure out what questions to ask. The giveaway was that they periodically motioned to staffers to come over to explain things. After Rumsfeld finished reading, we learned what questions those memos had urged. First, Warner asked Myers whether U.S. forces were ready to fight in Iraq, Korea, and against terrorism at the same time. Myers responded, "Absolutely."

That was it: one question about combat readiness and one superficial, mostly rhetorical answer. Had Warner or the horde of staffers sitting behind him bothered to scratch the surface, they would have found real problems. For example, shortly after the hearing, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki wrote to Congress complaining that the Army was anything but "absolutely" ready. According to his letter, Army readiness accounts were already $3.2 billion short for base operations, ammunition and training.

Warner again interrupted the questioning to announce that he had just received a hand-delivered letter from the CIA stating that evidence of a North Korean missile with enough range to reach California was old news. Immediately after that, Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, began a question by stating that the day before, the CIA had revealed the new information that the North Koreans had a missile that could reach Hawaii. Things like that happen when senators don't pay attention and staffers don't tell them to revise their scripts. Akaka then moved on to his concerns about the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Guam.

Later came the new senator from Arkansas, Democrat Mark Pryor. I was looking forward to his questions. I worked for two years for his father, Sen. David Pryor, D-Ark., a real tiger on oversight. Son Mark first read two questions from Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., who had by then left the hearing. Byrd's queries probed the missing budget request to pay for the war. Pryor got a nonanswer and, without any follow-up, moved on to his own question: "Wouldn't Secretary Rumsfeld agree that it would be terrible if Little Rock Air Force Base and Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas were closed?"

I was horrified. As far as I could tell, the 45 staffers present had done nothing to help their bosses understand where soldiers on the eve of war needed help, almost nothing to help senators exercise control of the purse strings to pay for the war, and very little that had anything to do with examining serious national security issues in peacetime, let alone during a war. The senators weren't any better. Not paying attention, reading off questions with dated information and nudging Rumsfeld about home state pork seemed to be their idea of how to prepare for war.

It wasn't oversight. Instead, a lot was overlooked.

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Oversight Overlooked

Winslow T. Wheeler — Thu, 01 May 2003 00:00:00 -0400

he four senators I worked for taught me that the most important thing I could do as a national security staffer was to help them with their oversight responsibilities. That is, to find out what was really going on in the Defense Department behind the gloss of official testimony, the military services' sleek budget brochures, and officers' slick briefings on supposedly flawless weapon systems. That way, my bosses could ask the kind of questions at committee hearings that would prompt Defense witnesses to glance back at their staff for help and promise to provide complete answers-just as soon as they found out themselves.

Warner responded with a budget initiative-not for the war, but for the Armed Services Committee. Warner wanted the senators to OK the committee's budget for travel, hearings and staffers' pay.

It wasn't oversight. Instead, a lot was overlooked.

Winslow T. Wheeler is a visiting senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, where he is writing a book on Congress and national security. Wheeler spent 31 years working for four senators from both political parties and for the General Accounting Office.

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Up to Our Eyeballs in Pork

Winslow T. Wheeler — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Washington ritual follows the passage of almost every appropriations bill. Congressional staffers dismayed by the pork larded through the measure alert journalists. A handful of self-declared "pork buster" legislators give speeches and release lists of objectionable items in the legislation.

Then, newspapers print two types of stories. Most mock the spending, as did The Washington Post, when Congress passed the 2003 omnibus appropriations bill, with a Feb. 17 story, "From Hill with Love, a Platter of Bacon." The article noted the silly stuff: $2 million for honey bee labs, $500,000 for recreational lakes, and $600,000 for boathouses. Other articles express outrage at the waste, the backdoor methods, and brazenness of Congress' senior appropriators, as did The Washington Post on Feb. 12. In "More Pork," a story about the same bill, the newspaper related the appalling list of special interest spending that Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, stuffed into the measure for his home state.

Unfortunately, that's usually about as far as the reporting goes.

These ritual stories only scratch the surface. The pork process on Capitol Hill has far more serious consequences than just wasting a few billion dollars and shameless pandering to special interests. The impact on national defense is truly corrosive.

Over the last 30 years, I worked for four different senators and was engaged, up to my eyeballs, in the pork process in Defense bills. To pay for much of the pork, Congress raids accounts vital for military readiness. Some politicians, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speak out against these raids. But neither these "pork busters," nor most journalists, have given the public a full description of just how wretched the system is and who really runs it.

From the newspapers, you'd think the pork in Defense bills is something Congress dreams up and adds, against the advice of the Defense Department. Not true. Some of the biggest pushers of Defense pork work in the Pentagon.

A vivid example is the acquisition of VIP transport aircraft for the use of senior military officers and bureaucrats and, of course, members of Congress and their staffs. There is a legitimate need for a very few senior military officers and top Defense civilians to travel in these specialized aircraft, which offer military communications equipment to keep in touch with headquarters. But if you've ever been inside a military VIP transport, you know they contain a few other items as well. Often, the planes include a galley and cook who can make you recant everything you ever said about airline food. Also often included: plated silverware, embossed glasses, plush seats, and male and female stewards-in military uniform, of course.

The aircraft in question range widely in size and amenities. The bottom of the line is a military variant of the Cessna Citation business jet, the UC-35. The cost varies, depending on model, from $4.1 million to $7.6 million. It lacks a full galley and leader-of-the-free-world cachet. Next up the scale is a Gulfstream V executive jet (a C-37) for up to $45 million. The top of the line is a Boeing 737 (C-40B) at $52 million.

Congress has been packing these aircraft into Defense's budget for years. Since fiscal 1999, Congress has added to Defense appropriations 13 Citations, two Gulfstreams, and two 737s, not one of them included in a Defense budget request. The total cost was $272 million, not counting operating costs. These planes were added to a fleet of hundreds of government VIP transports.

The new aircraft were not added because Cessna, Boeing or the Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. talked a member of Congress into buying them. They were added because military officers personally lobbied for them, especially the pricier models.

In 1999, for example, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the chief of Central Command, asked Defense for a Boeing-757 costing more than $90 million. The Defense comptroller told him his old but serviceable Boeing-707 had plenty of life left. Zinni ignored him and went through the back door to the appropriations committees.

An appropriations staffer called me to alert the Senate Budget Committee, where I then worked, that Zinni was going to get his airplane. What's more, the staffer said, the plane would not only cost far more than other aircraft in the fleet, but be bought through a lease-purchase agreement, which hides total costs by spreading them over multiple years, violating both Office of Management and Budget buying rules and the 1974 Budget Act. Zinni had found a friend in Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., the top-ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee's Defense Subcommittee. When made aware of the extraordinary cost of a 757 and of the parliamentary difficulty in violating the Budget Act, Zinni and Murtha reached a compromise. The general would get a cheaper 737/C-40B, and the acquisition would conform to budget rules. The $52 million aircraft was added to the fiscal 1999 Defense appropriation.

A year later, Coast Guard Commandant James Loy let it be known to Sen. Stevens that he wanted a new Gulfstream VIP transport. Along with six unrequested C-130J aircraft headed for the Coast Guard base in Kodiak, Alaska, Stevens added the Gulfstream to an emergency supplemental appropriations measure.

Very shortly thereafter, a fancy invitation arrived in my in box. It was for a Coast Guard ceremony to award the first annual Commodore Ellsworth P. Bertholf Award to, surprise of surprises, Sen. Stevens for his "long-term vision and leadership while making substantial contributions to . . . the Coast Guard." The gold embossed invitation and its timing were too exquisite to ignore. I gave it to a journalist. I thought the exposure would slow down the next general or admiral with visions of a shiny new personal transport dancing in his head.

But the very next year, Adm. Dennis Blair, the commander of the Navy's Pacific Command, sought a new 737/C-40B that Defense hadn't requested. The admiral knew just where to go. Blair, whose headquarters was in Honolulu, won over the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee's Defense Subcommittee, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. Blair also won Sen. Stevens' support. The $52 million aircraft was added to the fiscal 2001 Defense appropriation.

There is little difference between these aircraft and the thousands of more obscure projects that members of Congress add to Defense bills. But nothing in VIP transport pork benefits a legislator's home state. Nothing, that is, beyond what many on Capitol Hill esteem most: the ability to dispense large favors, knowing they can redeem them in the future. Might Inouye some day want Blair to support a bit of unbudgeted Navy spending in Honolulu? Why sure.

While the military officers were logrolling for personal transport aircraft, I was working on more mundane pork for the state of New Mexico on behalf of my boss, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. Each project followed the same methodology. A Defense bureaucrat (uniformed or civilian) made it known that he or she wanted spending the department hadn't formally requested. Examples include an upgrade to the high-speed test track at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, additional spending for mine detection research in Albuquerque, and micro-electronics testing at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.

Before I resigned from the Senate Budget Committee in June 2002, my fiscal 2003 list of member requests for New Mexico in the Defense appropriations bill consisted of 88 separate items costing $719 million. We knew that before any of these were added to the bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee staff would check with military base commanders, program managers, and research directors to make sure they really did want the extra spending. If they didn't, the "member request" was pretty much toast. If they did, it was only a question of money and how many projects senators wanted to stuff into the bill at the expense of things like military readiness. Such add-ons add up to real money-in the tens of billions of dollars. According to McCain's modest, conservative definition of pork, the 2003 Defense appropriations bill contained $8.3 billion of it.

This process bypasses the Defense secretary and his senior staff. They're the ones who put together the official budget request that the Defense bureaucracy spends the rest of the year adorning with baubles. The process makes many people happy: the Defense bureaucrats and senior officers get the spending they want, the "old bull" appropriator gets to dispense goodies, and the member of Congress broadcasts how effective he's been at bringing home the bacon.

But the Defense secretary is routed by his own bureaucracy, and his budget is converted into an ever-expanding spending machine. Thousands of men and women in the armed forces, some of them flying over Afghanistan (and soon Iraq) in combat aircraft made in the 1960s and 1970s, get diminished stocks of spare parts to keep their aging aircraft flying. But at least they get the pleasure of knowing that their top commanders are flying in style.

Winslow T. Wheeler is a visiting senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information. He spent 31 years working for four senators, from both political parties, and the General Accounting Office.

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Raids on the War Budget

Winslow T. Wheeler — Sun, 01 Dec 2002 00:00:00 -0500

fter more than 30 years working for the Senate and the General Accounting Office, I have observed many senators at close range. At times, I have felt great pride to be a small part of an institution that has responded so well to national crises. At other times, I have felt quite the opposite. What I saw and heard in the Senate chamber on the night of June 6 was very much in the latter category. The content of the debate that night and the legislative result are typical of how the Senate is mangling bills intended to help this nation fight terrorism in Afghanistan, at home, and soon, perhaps, in Iraq.

Just before midnight that Thursday, the press gallery was almost empty. The Senate had been working hard to pass a new $27 billion emergency supplemental appropriation that the president had requested in March for homeland defense and the war in Afghanistan. Earlier in the day, by an 87-10 vote, the senators had invoked cloture to prevent any filibustering. Now, the Senate was getting down to the endgame. Normally, at this point-even if it is close to midnight and members and staff are tired-there is often relief that things are getting done and it's almost time to go home.

There was no sense of accomplishment this time. On the contrary, many members were angry. Red in the face, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., told his colleagues, "What happened to me should not happen to any of you." Then, he violated Senate practice and called Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., by name, not "respected colleague" or some other honorific. Finally, Domenici spat out, "You can smile if you like, but there is nothing to smile about." McCain demanded "personal privilege [to speak out of turn] since my name was used." But before he could start, Domenici had stormed out of the chamber.

Others were cantankerous as well. Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said what happened to him was "unfair" and "arbitrary." Oregon's senators, Republican Gordon Smith and Democrat Ron Wyden, thought the problem might cost lives. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said sternly, "There is no way to correct this."

Why all the hot tempers? Had someone eviscerated the emergency appropriations bill? Were lives really threatened?

Not quite. The senators were being forced to follow their own rules.

As all 100 knew, when 87 senators invoked cloture on the bill, they limited further debate and other parliamentary shenanigans to just 30 hours. In addition, cloture restricted amendments to those deemed germane, that is, directly related to a specific subject already in the bill. The Senate's parliamentarian alone determines what is germane.

The senators were fuming because, as a result of their own vote for cloture, Domenici couldn't add to the supplemental bill a $50 million loan guarantee for the developer of a small passenger jet from his home state; Dorgan was denied his amendment for $400,000 for power transmission studies that would address, among others, his home state; the two senators from Oregon were unable to prevent the Air Force Reserve from moving a helicopter unit from their state; and Landrieu could not change a funding formula to permit 37 states, including her own, to keep Health and Human Services Department funds they had been overpaid.

All it takes to derail such measures is for some senator to ask the parliamentarian if the proposed amendment is germane. If not, it is barred. Because McCain was willing to ask the question, the rest of the Senate was not being allowed to ignore the rules.

McCain's questions didn't come without warning. Earlier in the week, in the middle of the day when the press gallery was as populated and attentive as it gets during regular business, McCain had declared, "The worst damage, the worst pork-barreling, the egregious stuff done around here is in managers' amendments." (Managers' amendments are adopted in a block by unrecorded votes at the instigation of a bill's managers, usually the chairman and ranking minority member of the committee that wrote the bill.) McCain said he was going to demand separate roll call votes on each amendment in any managers' package. Thus, every senator would be on record in favor of pork, or against it. Also, because managers' packages typically consist of 20 or more amendments and because each roll call vote takes about 15 minutes, McCain was going to inflict some temporal pain on the Senate if it wanted to lard up the bill.

The next day, McCain submitted 20 of his own amendments, each one removing a state-specific item inserted into the bill by the Appropriations Committee. The first was to remove $2 million for a new specimen storage facility for the Smithsonian Institution. The next was to extract $2.5 million for mapping coral reefs near Hawaii. The third would cut $50 million for Agricultural Research Service buildings in Ames, Iowa.

The arguments against McCain's amendments were some of the flimsiest I had ever heard. According to Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., new specimen storage for the Smithsonian was an urgent homeland security need. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, said the coral reef study was not pork because the Commerce and Defense departments would compete over the contracts for the work. He also seemed to imply that any other state with coral reefs was welcome to try for this spending. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said of the Agriculture Research Service building proposal, "Keep in mind, this is a national laboratory. It is not an Iowa lab." Was he actually trying to say that a federal facility in a state is never pork?

McCain lost on his first three amendments with at least 60 senators voting against him on each one. Were three-fifths of the senators such dunderheads that they bought the arguments against McCain? Of course not, but they knew that if McCain were able to knock out someone else's pork, theirs might be next. It was an unspoken, mutual pork protection pact.

But when McCain's anti-pork offensive fell apart, he reversed course. McCain clearly saw the futility of his amendments and picked up the germaneness tool instead to block the additions that Domenici, Dorgan, Smith and Wyden, and Landrieu were seeking. But McCain used the tool to enable more pork than he busted.

The supplemental bill already included funds for many agencies and programs, including the Agriculture, Commerce, State, Justice, Energy, Labor, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, and Defense departments. Before cloture had been invoked, even more had been added: AMTRAK, federal aid to highways, the Smithsonian Institution, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and more-all at an additional cost of $3.9 billion. Thus, the playing field already was large when cloture closed the door to new subjects.

While McCain kept non-germane amendments out of the bill, other senators were busy putting germane stuff in. In all, they added 42 germane amendments. They included Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison's technical change to enable $10 million for agricultural aid to her state; Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning's $1 million in water services for Kentucky; the Oregon senators' $500,000 to reduce West Coast fishing capacity; and Alaska Republican Ted Stevens' exemption for Alaska from certain unemployment taxes, $464,000 for vocational training for specific Alaskans, altered requirements of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and changes to mail delivery in Alaska.

And so it went. There were a few amendments relevant to homeland security and the war in Afghanis- tan, such as a sense of the Senate amendment from Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., on how the FBI should be reorganized, but of the 42 amendments added, just nine were in any way relevant. The rest-33-were either completely irrelevant to the war, or consisted of in-state federal spending provisions whose authors either conceded irrelevance to the war or claimed a security connection, even though the provisions hadn't been requested by any security-related agency.

The 42 amendments were not adopted behind McCain's back; one by one, or in bunches, he explicitly approved them. It was germaneness that was culling them, not porkiness. Indeed, if amendments were found to be non-germane, McCain permitted the authors to modify them, if possible, to comply with the germaneness rule. After the managers' package was adopted, in block, by a single unrecorded voice vote, McCain stood up and said, "We should not be doing this."

Congress has been spending money for member items for centuries, so why be concerned now? Because the appetite in the Senate (and the House) for this kind of spending clearly has increased since the Sept. 11 attacks. Despite the fact that we are fighting a war against terror in Afghanistan, and probably soon in Iraq, and trying to defend the homeland from terrorist attack, Congress is paying for members' pet programs by siphoning off funds for military training, spare parts and maintenance for weapons, exercises and even combat operations.

For example, buried in the back of the 2003 Defense appropriation under "General Provisions" were many sections reducing spending for the operations and maintenance accounts that pay for training, equipment upkeep and key readiness activities. Some examples:

Section 8082 extracted $338 million in foreign currency savings the Appropriations Committee predicted to occur from a rising dollar between Oct. 1, 2002, and Sept. 30, 2003-a strange prediction given that the dollar has been falling against the euro and the yen.
Section 8097 permitted $68 million in unexplained transfers out of operations and maintenance.
Section 8100 declared the Defense Department would save $400 million in "reforms" and "efficiencies."
Section 8109 reduced operations and maintenance spending for information technology by $19.5 million.
Section 8135 cut a whopping $1.674 billion in the operations and maintenance and other accounts to make up for "revised economic assumptions."

The Office of Management and Budget has told the Senate many times that such savings are unlikely to be realized. The Defense Department is unwilling or unable (or both) to be sufficiently aggressive to save the funds. These and similar provisions, amounting to more than $2 billion in the 2003 bill, simply are disguised cuts in the operations and maintenance budget. Despite these sections in its own bill, the Appropriations Committee's report states: "The primary goals of this bill are to ensure readiness and fair treatment of our men and women in uniform."

It should surprise no one that the politicians are saying one thing while doing another. However, in time of war-especially one against something as sinister and unnerving as terrorism-one would hope that at least a few politicians would rise above their normal behavior. Instead, Congress mounts more raids than ever on the military readiness budget to pay for goodies to impress the voters back home. It's not a pretty sight.

Winslow T. Wheeler was an assistant director for national defense at the General Accounting Office and worked for four senators. His critiques of Congress' handling of Defense spending, published under the pseudonym "Spartacus," landed him in trouble with senior senators. He resigned in June from his job as Sen. Pete Domenici's senior analyst on the Budget Committee.

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