ARMY PAYROLL = POLITICAL FOOTBALL

If we’re going to send hun­dreds of thou­sands of young men and women into harm’s way, the least we could do is not screw with their pay­checks.
Common sense maybe. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pre­sum­ably dis­agrees. Back in December, reg­u­lar Defense Tech read­ers will recall, Rummy’s brain­trust decided to dip into the Army’s pay­roll into order to fund truck armor and other wartime expenses. Congress would make up the dif­fer­ence later on, they fig­ured, with a sec­ond, emer­gency “sup­ple­men­tal” fund­ing bill. The fact that the pay­roll accounts would dry up in May didn’t seem to fac­tor into the Pentagon cal­cu­lus — except maybe as a lever to force Congress into action.
But as sen­a­tors loaded the $80 bil­lion sup­ple­men­tal with pet projects — $23 mil­lion for a base­ball sta­dium in DC, $32 mil­lion for for­est roads in Cali — and the Pentagon added bil­lions in long-​​term pro­grams to the sup­pos­edly last-​​minute fund­ing mea­sure, its progress slowed.
So now, Rummy is get­ting all weepy, com­plain­ing to Congress that they’re keep­ing sol­diers from get­ting paid.
“Our folks out there need these funds,” he moped in hand­writ­ten notes to Capitol Hill chief­tains, obtained by CNN.

The Army has slowed its spend­ing, so it can con­tinue oper­a­tions in Afghanistan and Iraq through early May when the funds are due to run out, Rumsfeld said…
Without [the supplemental’s] pas­sage, Rumsfeld warned he would have to move funds which would “seri­ously dis­rupt other activ­i­ties,” and he might have to invoke the “Feed and Forage Act” to keep the deployed troops oper­at­ing.
The Feed and Forage Act allows the mil­i­tary depart­ments to incur oblig­a­tions in excess of avail­able appro­pri­a­tions for cloth­ing, sub­sis­tence, fuel, quar­ters, trans­porta­tion and med­ical sup­plies, accord­ing to Pentagon officials.

I sup­pose it’s nice that Rumsfeld cares enough about our sol­diers to invoke emer­gency mea­sures in order to clothe and feed ‘em. But wouldn’t it have been bet­ter not to sneak off with their pay­checks in the first place?
THERE’S MORE: “Who in their right mind would vote to stop the pro­duc­tion of armored Humvees?” asks Minstrel Boy. “The odds are 39% that it was your sen­a­tor. That’s right. “A sim­ple mea­sure [an ammend­ment to the sup­ple­men­tal] to keep the pro­duc­tion of armored humvees at two shift capac­ity for a cou­ple of extra months this sum­mer passed by only a 22 vote mar­gin; 61 to 39 in the Senate [last] week.”

April 28th, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.