Defense News - NASCAR, Bands Featured in U.S. House Panel Debate

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By: Kate Brannen

Rather than tackle the day's weightier issues - are operations in Libya in the vital interests of the United States? Can the country continue to afford a $700 billion defense budget? - House appropriators decided to take on some slightly smaller questions when they met to mark up the 2012 defense spending bill.

For example, they asked themselves, is the Pentagon spending a little too much each year on military bands? How about NASCAR sponsorships? Members of the House Appropriations Committee agreed the answer to the first question is yes. However, the NASCAR issue proved to be somewhat thornier.

After these issues were laid to rest, House appropriators voted in favor of the spending bill, which provides $530 billion for the defense base budget and $119 billion for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The legislation does not include funding for military construction, military family housing, civil defense or nuclear warheads, which are handled in separate funding bills.

There was no discussion of the roles and missions review that the Pentagon is conducting to shape budget cuts over the next few years. There was also very little discussion of weapon programs, including the Pentagon's chronic problems with cost overruns and schedule delays.

The panel did adopt an amendment pertaining to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. However, the amendment merely reaffirmed the language already included in the legislation and restated the importance of the program.

While the F-35 program - the Pentagon's most expensive development effort - did not receive much scrutiny, the military's spending on musical bands did.

The committee adopted an amendment that would limit the DoD spending on bands to $200 million in 2012. According to Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., the Pentagon plans to spend $320 million on military bands in 2011.

There was an identical amendment in the defense authorization bill passed by the House last month.

McCollum also introduced an amendment that questioned the effectiveness of the military's sponsorship of NASCAR, wrestling, fishing and other sports events to recruit men and women to join the military. She said she had yet to see evidence that these recruiting efforts were working.

Her amendment would not end the practice, but would give Congress greater oversight.

Rep. C. W. Bill Young, R-Fla., did not try to hide his loyalties.

"We have a large NASCAR venue in Florida - it's called Daytona," the chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee said. He disagreed with McCollum and said that the military's sponsorship of sporting events is a very effective recruiting tool. He told the panel that he "enthusiastically" opposed the amendment.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the committee's ranking member, called for a briefing on the issue. "Let's get both sides of the story," he said. "We don't know enough yet."

The committee also debated how far it wanted to go in enforcing the House's earmark ban, an order introduced by the Republican leadership at the beginning of the year.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., put forward an amendment that would attempt to further limit earmarks after the House Armed Services Committee reportedly used a loophole to include some suspect legislative adds.

Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, Flake's anti-earmark legislation was not met favorably.

Young said he was worried it had the potential to harm important programs, even though it did include an exception for programs deemed important to national security.

Several Democratic lawmakers said they supported the use of earmarks as long as they were valid, transparent and stood up to public scrutiny.

In the end, the amendment was voted down with a loud voice vote.

There were a handful of amendments that were more pertinent to military operations around the world.

The committee approved an amendment that would limit funds to Pakistan until the Pentagon reports in detail how it plans to spend the money. The committee voted to spend $1 million to form an independent, bipartisan Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group to assess the status of U.S. efforts there.

Flake put forward another amendment that would require the Pentagon to provide more information on how it planned to save and then reinvest $100 billion over the coming years.

At the end of the hearing, the committee's chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., praised the group's efforts and said, "The debate in here is high level."

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