By Emelie Rutherford
A member of a powerful defense panel in Congress is trying to garner the Army’s feedback on reforming lawmakers’ practice of earmarking funds in legislation for specific military items.
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), a minority-side member of the earmark-friendly House Appropriations Defense subcommittee (HAC-D), said he will ask a senior Army official in writing to spell out “the goods and the bads of earmarks.”
“Because (earmarking) has got to snarl up the system,” Kingston told Defense Daily. “Sometimes it cuts away the tape, but sometimes I’m sure it clogs things.”
Kingston said he believes Congress sometimes needs to earmark funds for specific companies’ products, noting lawmakers’ frustration with Pentagon processes that don’t always deliver the solutions troops on the ground want. And, he said Congress sometimes receives mixed messages on proposed earmarks.
“What we’ll find is, the Pentagon will tell us, ‘Yes, we do want that earmark.’ And you want to grab them and say, ‘Why they heck aren’t you buying it yourself?'” Kingston said.
The congressman quizzed Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson, the military deputy to the Army’s top acquisition official, during a hearing yesterday on whether defense earmarking is “a growing problem or a growing solution.”
To the question of whether earmarks are good or bad, Thompson told the HAC-D, “It depends.”
He said the Army’s strategic objective is to have a “full and open” competition for contract actions, though he noted there are exceptions that are approved at the senior- Pentagon level.
While the Army looks at the type of innovative solutions that lawmakers also hear about, Thompson said the service has to ensure the products address real needs identified in solicitation requests.
The Army official added that “a lot of people oversell the value of their product or service.”
“And when you bore into it and you look at it objectively, with standard criteria that we do for all of our contracts, the ones that are good come to the top, the ones that are not so good come to the bottom,” he said, adding companies always can protest contract decisions.
Kingston told Thompson he wants to work “closely” with him to improve the way lawmakers earmark defense items. The congressman said he “philosophically believe(s) in the legislative-branch prerogative” to earmark items not included in the executive branch’s budget request. Yet he also said he doesn’t want to waste taxpayers’ money, and hopes to hear from the Army “if there’s anything we need to know that we can do better.”
Kingston told Defense Daily any additional written input from Thompson, “even a vague impression of a bad earmark,” will be valuable.
The Georgia Republican filed unsuccessful legislation last year that would have created a bipartisan Joint Select Committee on Earmark Reform.
The heads of the House and Senate appropriations committees pledged last month to reduce earmarks to 50 percent of the 2006 level “for non-project-based accounts,” and to require more disclosure of earmark requests (Defense Daily, Jan. 12).