I know most people have moved on to bigger and better White House scandals, but I’m still bothered by the fact that the Bush administration diverted $700 million from appropriations meant for the war Afghanistan and spent it to prepare for our invasion of Iraq. Just as importantly, the White House did not consult with lawmakers about the transfer, as the law required.
This was a fun story for a while, but like all Bush scandals, the White House denied everything, reporters moved on, and the controversy fell under the weight of a newer Bush-related scandals.
Thankfully, however, a Republican House member from Ohio is still talking about the administration’s decision to bypass Congress on war appropriations. Apparently, he believes the complaints are justified.
When Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio) went on an inspection trip to several Persian Gulf countries in the summer of 2002, he was dazzled by the state-of-the-art command centers, airstrips and other facilities being built there for the U.S. military.
But he was also troubled. Some of what he saw or learned from military briefers had not been approved by the House Appropriations Committee panel on military construction, which he then chaired. “I knew I didn’t have that kind of money,” he quipped recently.
Hobson’s inquiries ultimately led to a modest tightening of controls over the Pentagon’s ability to move money between military accounts without prior approval from Congress. But the episode has sparked concerns on the part of some lawmakers that the Bush administration largely bypassed Congress as it expanded installations in the Persian Gulf region before the war with Iraq.
This story came to public light, of course, because Bob Woodward’s new book explains how lawmakers on the Hill were “conned” by the White House. But this point overlooks the most important part of the problem: the law prevents such abuses from occurring. The administration simply cannot take money appropriated for one purpose and spend it on something else. That’s illegal.
While Hobson probably isn’t prepared to draw such conclusions, he’s effectively acknowledging that Woodward’s account — Bush set the stage for war with “no real knowledge or involvement” of Congress — is true.
At this point, there still seems to be some disagreement between administration officials at the Pentagon and administration allies in Congress.
[T]he extent to which key congressional committees were given details of the prewar buildup is now a matter of contention between the Pentagon and some senior lawmakers, who say that, at the least, the Pentagon failed to follow the spirit of the laws requiring consultation.
In August, Hobson and aides traveled to Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and saw work underway or learned about projects that had not been approved by the military construction subcommittee.
“I did what any congressman would do,” Hobson said in an interview last week. “Our role in appropriations is to find money [for projects] but also to look and see where the funding is going.”
So Hobson and others kept asking questions, which the Pentagon kept dodging. Congress may have the “power of the purse,” but the administration decided it didn’t feel like sharing expenditure details with lawmakers.
An October 2002 classified briefing for congressional committees provided only general information, and Hobson’s subcommittee kept pressing for what is known as Form 1391s: descriptions of individual projects that include line-item detail.
Pentagon officials provided congressional staffs with additional briefings on spending in the winter and spring of 2003, but congressional aides, who asked not to be named, said the details were still often spotty, even allowing for the need to safeguard the security of U.S. facilities and avoid political difficulties for Muslim governments providing secret support to the United States.
The Pentagon, not surprisingly, continues to insist that its vague reports to Congress constituted legal “consultation,” so no one did anything illegal by diverting funds. Not everyone on the Hill agrees.
Thomas Gavin, a spokesman for Sen. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, took issue with that. Gavin said 11 of the 21 projects qualified as military construction activities.
“The first time that the staff of the defense subcommittee saw that list was after the publication of Mr. Woodward’s book,” he said.
Gavin said an October 2002 classified briefing for congressional defense staffs covered “parts” of three of the 11 projects and a second briefing the following April covered an additional four.
“To the best of our knowledge, the administration failed to follow the law when it came to keeping the people’s representatives fully informed on how they were spending these dollars,” Gavin said.
I should note, this is the first story about the controversy in a major newspaper in weeks. Will the Post report spark a new round of interest? I’m not optimistic. The paper stuffed this story on page A17 — not exactly a high-profile slot.