It’s amazing what lobbyists and politicians are selling as crucial to the war on terror. California date farmers led a massive push to send their fruit to Afghanistan, arguing that dates were essential to aid starving Afghans. Road-sign manufacturers lobbied for new signs to better direct panicked citizens out of besieged cities. Since August the 2002 government-budget projection has shrunk from a $176 billion surplus to a $100 billion deficit, due largely to the economic downturn but also to the way 9-11 swept away spending restraint. “Everybody in town realized that… now the deficit doesn’t matter anymore,” complains Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. “I mean, you had the government setting aside money to buy bison meat in the stimulus package!” (The U.S. government shelled out $6 million to buy surplus bison meat in February.)
Many senators simply recycled old requests in the new language of homeland defense. The farm-subsidy program–the Agricultural Act of 2001–was renamed the Farm Security Act. One provision, a $3.5 billion subsidy for peanut farmers, “strengthens America’s national security,” insisted Alabama Rep. Terry Everett. The milk lobby won backing to protect the “security” of the nation’s milk supply," with millions in subsidies for dairy farmers. After 9-11, Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina renamed his $4.5 billion funding bill for Amtrak, the troubled national passenger railway, the National Defense Rail Act. Andy Davis, a Hollings spokesman, calls the new name “a historical reference” to the role of railways in national defense. So what does this bill defend? “The impact to the economy,” Davis says.
Never mind that some economists think America’s mounting debts are the worse threat to the economy. After the Bush administration decided to bail out the airlines in late September, industries from insurance to car rentals and buses requested bailouts. “A lot of groups were perceived as working the Hill over,” says Michele Janis, vice president of communications for the American Bus Association. “The shoelace industry was saying, ‘The time has never been worse for shoelaces.’ That discredited a lot of the bigger industries that truly were hurt in a very direct way, such as ours.”
The biggest opportunities were in the Pentagon budget. Defense spending rose $33 billion last year–the largest increase since the Reagan era. Much of that money went to mobilizing for the war in Afghanistan and beyond. But not all. According to Arizona Sen. John McCain, U.S. senators added almost 100 pet projects, totaling $900 million, to the first military-spending bill passed after 9-11. The projects included a new museum and air-conditioning and water projects for military bases from Texas to California. Staffers for McCain identified $3.6 billion more in wasteful spending in the main defense-appropriations bill, too.
This is not the first case of war’s inspiring a spending frenzy. Congress began building the interstate-highway system during the 1950s so the Army would be able to move quickly in the event of a Soviet invasion. Subsidies to higher education have roots in U.S. fear that it was falling behind in the space race after the Soviets launched Sputnik. “George Bush is certainly trying to advance his agenda by linking spending in some ways to the war on terrorism and homeland security,” says Thomas Mann, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution. “It’s not unusual. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised by members of Congress and special interests trying to link to broader concerns.”
In fact the wave of opportunism has yet to crest. Congress is now holding hearings on next year’s budget. “People are sneaking in all sorts of things under the guise of homeland security, and everything is building up to the budgets that will be enacted in the summer and fall,” says Ron Utt of the conservative Heritage Foundation, adding: “It’s disgraceful.” White House budget director Mitch Daniels recently warned that Bush would veto pork-barrel spending in the name of 9-11, which Daniels called “out of hand.” But Bush’s own budget increases spending to deficit levels for the first time since 1997, including an additional $20 billion for the Pentagon. So far the request appears largely free of gimmies irrelevant to the war on terror, but it’s a big pie. And Congress has just begun to fight over it.
