NARRATOR: What do this aircraft, submarine, fighter plane and tank have in common? Are they inexpensive? No. Are they necessary for the defense of the United States? No. In fact, they're weapons the Pentagon did not want, yet Congress ordered the Pentagon to spend the taxpayers' money anyway.

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]

Rear Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

I think everyone agrees that the level of military spending is too high and must be reduced. The Pentagon even recognizes that and has submitted a list of weapons they think they need to carry out their tasks and have eliminated some of the weapons they'd previously asked for.

Now the Congress of the United States, of course, raises and supports armies and provides the money to operate them. But it may surprise you to find out that the Congress actually provides weapons that the Pentagon doesn't want. Our program is on that subject today and I think you'll find it very interesting.

NARRATOR: During the 1980s, the military spent more than two trillion dollars to wage the cold war against the Soviet Union. Now the Soviet Union no longer exists. The cold war is over. Common sense dictates spending less money on defense. However, the military continues cold war levels of spending. Over the next five years, the military will spend $1.4 trillion to prepare for a war that will not happen against an enemy that does not exist.

Will anyone put the brakes on wasteful military spending?

Bill Clinton talks of only modest changes in military spending. Weapons makers lobby strenuously to preserve their lucrative contracts and Congress continues to spend money on weapons even the Pentagon does not want.

DICK CHENEY, Secretary of Defense (before Senate Armed Services Committee):

"Congress has let me cancel a few programs, but you've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements. "You've directed me to buy the V-22, a program I don't need. You've directed me to buy more M-1s, F-14s and F-16s... Congress has directed me to spend money on all kinds of things that are not related to defense, but mostly related to politics back home in the district."

NARRATOR: Congress is empowered by the Constitution to "raise and support armies." To do so, Congress consults the military. But, in the end, it is Congress' responsibility to reject or accept Pentagon advice. Sometimes, however, Congress rejects the advice of the Pentagon to cancel weapons not for military reasons but for political reasons.

The Seawolf nuclear attack submarine, designated the SSN-21, is a prefect example. The Navy intended the Seawolf to combat future Soviet submarines. Now that there is no Soviet Union, those Soviet subs will never be built. The Pentagon no longer wants the Seawolf, but Congress forced the Pentagon to buy the attack submarine anyway because building it provides jobs.

Secretary CHENEY (before Senate Budget Committee):

"The SSN-21 would be nice. Again, our problem is just sheer cost. Where am I going to come up with the savings that everybody would like to come up with? And we've identified these programs, and the SSN-21 specifically, because the thing that was driving that construction program was our anticipation of improved Soviet submarine capabilities."

NARRATOR: After the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Defense Secretary Cheney wanted to build only one Seawolf, but Congress forced Secretary Cheney to buy a second Seawolf and set aside money to build a third. The cost to the taxpayer: $2.2 billion, enough money to teach 30 million Americans to read.

Why did Congress waste taxpayers' money on a weapon the Pentagon said it did not need?

Republican Senator Hank Brown of Colorado has labored to trim billions of dollars in military waste. He says the Seawolf is being built solely because it saves jobs.

Senator HANK BROWN (R-CO): The money we spend for defense ought to be to defend our country, not to make public works projects in people's home states. We're now building the Seawolf submarine that simply isn't needed. The ships it's supposed to track down don't deploy from port anymore and aren't being produced anymore.

INTERVIEWER: Those were Soviet ships?

Senator BROWN: But we still continue to build the Seawolf, not for defense, but for civilian jobs.

NARRATOR: David Pryor, the respected senator from Arkansas, does not mince words when he says the Seawolf is a jobs program.

Senator DAVID PRYOR (D-AR): In my way of thinking, this was an economic move, pure and simple. It was jobs.

INTERVIEWER: The Seawolf.

Senator PRYOR: It was jobs for that part of the country.

NARRATOR: Still, Senator Pryor voted in favor of building the second Seawolf.

Senator PRYOR: When the time rolls around that -- when my military jobs get in trouble, if we have not made that transi- tion, I hope that they will know that Arkansas, my home state, my home town, is having economic transition problems, and I hope the same people that asked me for my help will remember me and remember our people, our workers, and our plight.

NARRATOR: Brian Kelly is a Washington Post editor and author of "Adventures in Porkland," a hard-hitting examination of the complex world of government spending. He's an expert on the politics behind congressional budget-making.

BRIAN KELLY: You have the sort of logrolling that goes on: You do me a favor, I'll do you a favor. Sometimes it's very practical in nature: Here is a colleague who is of our party who is under pressure, who's got a strong opponent. Let's throw him some bones so he can take them home and say to the folks back home, "Look what I brought you." And sometimes it's just the old boy network which exists: I've done you favors in the past and, you know, you take care of me.

NARRATOR: Senator Brown feels strongly that trading votes has resulted in the federal budget deficit of well over $300 billion.

Senator BROWN: All too often, people have simply said, "I'll vote for your port if you'll vote for my pork." That trading of votes, that willingness to support spending programs that a member may not feel has any value, but feels compelled to support so that others will support their port, that process is what's caused the runaway deficit.

NARRATOR: Some lawmakers dispute Senator Brown's belief that vote trading is harmful. In many cases, members of Congress believe they have no choice.

One problem with vote trading is that it enables those lawmakers with the most trading power unequalled opportunity to affect legislation. According to author Brian Kelly, the most powerful lawmakers are those on the influential defense appro-priations subcommittees.

Mr. KELLY: The appropriations committees have most of the control over those dollars. These are the folks who are writing line by line the defense budget. They are the ones who sit in the conference committees, in the dark of night, with the doors closed, and will put in provisions that favor them or that favor someone they want to favor. And this is why people, for instance, on defense appropriations are viewed as so powerful because they're really barons on Capitol Hill who are beseeched by other members who come up asking for favors, asking for things to be kept in their home districts.

NARRATOR: The V-22 Osprey is another example of a major weapon that the Pentagon did not want. Again, Congress forced the Pentagon to buy it. The V-22 is a tilt-rotor aircraft. It is supposed to take off and land like a helicopter and fly like a plane. It is intended to transport Marines and their supplies over moderate distances.

Secretary of Defense Cheney has tried since 1989 to cut the Osprey from the department's budget.

Secretary CHENEY (before Senate Armed Services Committee): "My problem with the program has always been primarily one of affordability, Senator. When we made the decision initially not to go forward with the V-22 -- it was back in the Spring of '89, almost three years ago, and some $300 billion ago in terms of our five-year, our out-year defense program. Now we've got a much smaller budget. The procurement budget's been even harder hit."

NARRATOR: Even though the Pentagon did not want the V-22, Congress ordered the military to spend more money on the aircraft. The cost to the taxpayer, $2 billion. And if the military buys a fleet of 612 V-22s, the cost to the taxpayer will be an additional $22 billion. That's enough money to upgrade K through 12 education to meet international standards and provide Pell education grants to more than five million college students.

Why did Congress ignore the Pentagon's wishes?

True, Congress is empowered by the Constitution to make the final decisions on military spending, but in the case of the V-22, Congress rejected sound military advice. It forced the Pentagon to spend taxpayers' money, not because the V-22 is militarily useful, but, in part, because influential members of Congress, whose states stood to gain by V-22 approval, threw their weight around.

The V-22 is being built by Boeing-Vertol near Phila-delphia and Bell-Textron in Fort Worth. Three powerful members of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee hail from Pennsyl-vania and Texas.

But military programs are not solely approved because influential members of Congress support them or because they provide jobs.

Congressman Pete Geren is the energetic representative from Fort Worth, Texas. He fought persuasively to keep the V-22 alive for its military and potential commercial use.

Representative PETE GEREN (D-TX): It's so easy to look at programs like this and look at them purely from a parochial standpoint, and I think that really misses the heart and soul of the V-22 issue if that's all you look at. There are a lot of jobs issues out there, whether you're talking about building tanks, or building submarines, or bridges here, or highways there, that affect a lot of people's pocketbooks. But none of those, even though many of them involve multiples of the number of jobs we're talking about here, none of those generated the kind of excite- ment that we have for the V-22. It's just a program people see as part of the future.

NARRATOR: Congressman Geren pushed the V-22 because of the aircraft's merits. But he admits many colleagues were attracted by the prospect of jobs.

Rep. GEREN: There is the hope in the future for extensive job impact, and that's certainly some people's excitement about the program. But when you look at the number of people who are working on it right now, it's not very many when you look at many other programs out there. I expect though, when this thing does go into full production, we're talking about something that will employ tens of thousands of Americans and become a major export product for this country.

And the economic impact for our country, I think, is hard to exaggerate, if we do pull it off like we should. So, it's definitely a jobs issue. It's an economy issue. It's an American technology issue.

NARRATOR: Tom Schatz is an outspoken critic of spending that wastes tax dollars. He's the president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog group that monitors federal spending. Mr. Schatz explains that it is not only members of the appropriations committees who get money for their districts: Georgia's Senator Sam Nunn, who heads the Armed Services Commit- tee, knows how to use military spending for the folks back home.

TOM SCHATZ: There were two executive jets, worth about $25-, $26 million apiece that the Pentagon didn't request that are being sent because people in Georgia and Pennsylvania, in this case, are helping to keep the Gulfstream Corporation in business. Sam Nunn has helped out in this area, and by John Murtha of Pennsylvania in the House who, even though he's not from the area, has been very favorably disposed to putting this in for the last two or three years. The Gulfstream Corporation has gotten well over $90 million for these executive jets in the last couple of years.

NARRATOR: Likewise, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin, makes sure that the Army buys trucks made in his home state, Wisconsin.

In addition to buying weapons the Pentagon does not want, Congress sometimes forces the military to buy more of a particular weapon than the military wants. This is the case with the F-14 "Tomcat," a Navy fighter jet.

Senator Brown explains that Secretary of Defense Cheney attempted to stop Congress from buying more F-14s because the Navy did not need them.

Senator BROWN: We've been producing fighter planes that were outdated ten years ago -- and the Pentagon says it doesn't want -- for our aircraft carriers simply because they happen to be produced in a state that's very influential.

NARRATOR: That state is New York. Grumman Corporation, the nation's tenth largest military contractor, builds the F-14 on Long Island. Since 1989, Secretary of Defense Cheney has worked to reduce the F-14 program, but Congress rebuffed Secretary Cheney and purchased 30 unwanted fighters. The cost to the tax-payer: nearly $2.5 billion, more than enough to refurbish and upgrade the nation's system of passenger railroads.

Members of Congress do not lobby just for the big ticket items like the V-22, Seawolf, and F-14. Secretary Cheney highlights some of the more obscure military pork barrel projects.

Secretary CHENEY (Senate Armed Services Committee): "Congress, for example, has directed me to spend $129 million on grants to specified universities, to be awarded non-competitively for subjects that we don't need to study. Congress has added $12 million for four museums that honor fine aspects of defense, but this is not the type of thing we need to be spending money on in these days of tight defense budgets. Congress has directed me to spend $61 million on unnecessary Meals Ready-to-Eat, when we're already having trouble giving MREs away."

NARRATOR: According to Tom Schatz, one of the most notori-ous expenditures went to a small parochial school in Pennsylvania run by nuns who never asked for the money.

Mr. SCHATZ: In 1992, Congressman Joe McDade got $10 million for Marywood College in Scranton to run a program to study stress on military families. Again, non-competitive, money that the school didn't necessarily want. The school only has a $20 million budget, which means that a third of all their spending goes for this one program.

NARRATOR: Ten million dollars may not seem significant in light of the billions being spent on the V-22 aircraft and the Seawolf submarine, but add up all of these so-called small ticket items and the price tag soars.

According to the "Porkbusters Coalition," a Capitol Hill organization composed of 45 lawmakers and 14 taxpayer groups, the taxpayers paid at least $7.6 billion in wasteful military spending. That's more than enough money to fully fund research for AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer's, and heart disease.

These are just some of the wasteful programs in the 1993 budget. The total of those so-called small ticket items is a little more than $2 billion, enough money to build 424 elementary schools for 250,000 children.

Tom Schatz charges that Congress often approves wasteful spending with little public scrutiny.

Mr. SCHATZ: They sit, in many cases, behind closed doors. They put this in language that's very difficult to understand. It's brought to the floor very quickly. Senators and congressmen do not have time to review these bills. And even if they did, they wouldn't necessarily find the pork.

NARRATOR: According to Brian Kelly, the notion that many of these programs are vital to the United States if laughable.

Mr. KELLY: You often find congressmen making a national security case for these weapons systems, which sometimes can be really quite ludicrous to watch these people who are instant arm-chair defense experts who will tell you, "Well, we've got to have a 15-carrier Navy, that's the only way we can survive in this modern environment." What they're really talking about is jobs for Philadelphia because a carrier is going to get rehabbed there, or built there, or whatever the circumstance might be.

NARRATOR: Like Congress, the White House is not immune to pressure. In the recent presidential election, President Bush and Bill Clinton vied for the votes of defense workers, sometimes supporting weapons the Pentagon did not want.

Speaking before the workers at Electric Boat's shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, candidate Bill Clinton sounded his support for the Seawolf. George Bush reversed his position on the V-22 during the campaign when he thought it could help his reelection bid.

Mr. KELLY: Well, the Osprey's an interesting case because I think that gets to the heart of what we call presidential pork. The Osprey is something that the administration fought, the Pentagon said it didn't want. Congressmen in a variety of dis- tricts battled mightily to keep it in the budget. But suddenly in the later Summer, when George Bush decided to get serious about campaigning and when James Baker became his campaign manager, he fell back on a sort of a time-honored cynical politics of giving away the store, and one of the first things they decided to give away was the Osprey.

NARRATOR: Why did the candidates support these expensive, unnecessary weapons? The answer is simple: Jobs and votes.

Mr. KELLY: The Osprey is made principally in two places, Pennsylvania and Texas, both of which were viewed as essential to Bush's reelection. So again, here's a decision having nothing to do with national security, nothing to do with defense, everything to do with electoral politics.

NARRATOR: And, says Congressman Geren from Fort Worth, the Bell-Textron workers, particularly members of the United Auto Workers Union, vote.

Rep. GEREN: The story of the saving of the V-22 has a hundred chapters, but the UAW and UAW retirees -- people who have no direct financial stake in it, but just have worked on it over the years and believe so strongly in it -- have taken this on as a very personal campaign. And the retirees in Forth Worth would send literally tens of thousands of letters up here to members of Congress who are in positions to influence committee considera-tion of this program. The UAW itself made it one of their check-list issues a couple of years ago. And we had a great coordinated effort between the company, the unions...

NARRATOR: In the case of the Seawolf, Bill Clinton was clearly hedging his electoral bets. General Dynamics builds the Seawolf at its Electric Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut. Connecticut has only eight electoral votes, but Electric Boat awarded subcontracts in at least 35 states, including states with large numbers of electoral votes: New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California and Pennsylvania. Bill Clinton needed 270 electoral votes to win the White House. These five states alone would have put him halfway there.

The White House and Congress are not the only institu-tions which have an interest in spending taxpayers' money; weapons makers also weigh-in heavily on military decisionmaking.

Mr. KELLY: Defense firms exert a tremendous pressure on the spending side. I mean, they are out for their own interests here and they are, on the one hand, I think doing a good job of seeing the future and trying to downsize and diversify, but, on the other hand, keeping the pressure on as it comes to specific weapons systems. The folks who want the Osprey, the folks who want the rehab of the M-1 tank, the folks who want the F-14 are all lobbying very strenuously in Congress, making the case this is jobs, this is the future of the community.

NARRATOR: Big contractors like McDonnell-Douglas, General Dynamics, Grumman and Boeing exercise shrewd political judgment in awarding subcontracts and locating their factories. They place them in states with big delegations in Congress, like New York and California, and states like Pennsylvania and George, whose representatives sit on powerful committees.

Campaign contributions by weapons makers to lawmakers is another form of lobbying. Critics contend that weapons makers are actually buying votes. Lawmakers and weapons producers, however, argue that, at the most, contributions ensure access but not influence.

This document, obtained by "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" from the Federal Election Committee, reveals that in the last two years, General Dynamics, whose Electric Boat Division makes the Seawolf submarine, donated large sums of money to powerful members of Congress:

...John Murtha, who chairs the influential House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, received $10,000.

...Les Aspin, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, received $8000.

...Joe McDade, the ranking Republican on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, received $6000.

...Daniel Inouye, who chairs the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, received $10,000.

A cozy liaison also exists between weapons producers and Pentagon officials.

Mr. KELLY: There's just a give and take of the Capitol Hill lobbying process, the revolving door of people moving from the Pentagon to defense companies, people who've recently testified before committees now working for the contractors, everyone sitting together in a room and plotting a strategy for how will we save the Osprey. I mean, this is plotted just like a military campaign. The congressmen from Pennsylvania, and the ones from Texas, and people from the industry, and the members of the Pentagon will sit down in a room and say, "How are we going to save this weapons system? What will it take?" It's often just as bold as that.

NARRATOR: Admiral William Crowe, the highly respected chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1980s, shows another aspect of how the system works. After leaving the mili-tary, Admiral Crowe joined other former Pentagon officials on the board of General Dynamics, the nation's second largest military contractor.

If the entire system is part of the problem, how can the country stop Washington from wasting the taxpayer's money?

Senator PRYOR: The country is far ahead of the politicians. The country's always ahead of the politicians. Now the politi-cians need to catch-up with where the country -- The country's ready to do something. The country's ready to move forward and now what we've got to do is supply the support system to let the country carry out its will.

NARRATOR: But will President Bill Clinton provide this leadership?

After all, candidate Clinton was a vocal supporter of both the Seawolf submarine and V-22 aircraft, two weapons that Secretary of Defense Cheney fought hard to cancel. Tom Schatz feels the new president will have no choice but to make changes.

Mr. SCHATZ: Mr. Clinton talks about cutting more than President Bush was going to cut, $60 billion or so more over the next five years. You can't get to those numbers when you've got a several billion dollar program like the Seawolf sitting there that the Pentagon doesn't want, that you could save the money on to meet any other priorities that you want to meet either within the military or on the domestic side. So, those choices simply have to be made.

NARRATOR: As for the taxpayer, Tom Schatz says the public needs to think more carefully about projects they ask their representatives to fund for their districts.

Mr. SCHATZ: Forty percent of your gross income, taxpayers' gross income, goes to the federal, state and local governments. And if you were going to sit down and look at your portfolio and your income and say I want to invest 40 percent of my money, would you invest it in the government? And if you did, wouldn't you demand a better return than a four trillion dollar debt? That's why people have to think a little bit more about the bigger picture than whether or not they're getting some project in their own backyard.

NARRATOR: Senator Hank Brown says the public must make its votes felt. If the taxpayer fails to vote, the money-wasters in Congress, the military and the weapons industry win.

Senator BROWN: The average person in America has to make their vote felt. What's happened now is special interests speak out and lobby and nobody lobbies on the other side. Every member of Congress knows that there's lots of political rewards for voting to spend money and only political penalties if you vote against spending. That has to change if we're ever going to straighten out Congress.

NARRATOR: In the final analysis, billions of dollars are wasted every year on weapons that are not needed for the defense of the United States. Unless we take responsibility, we continue to pay. Wasting money on porkbarrel weapons undermines our mili-tary and economic strength. To buy weapons the military does not need, the government must either tax more or cut more from useful civilian programs. Either way, the taxpayer pays.

Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, I don't know about you, but I found this program absolutely interesting and a lot of surprising facts introduced. Very clearly, during the cold war, the American public was quite willing to accept any weapons that the Pentagon wanted or that the Congress wanted. Today, however, we're enter- ing a new era.

The Pentagon, being sound military planners in many ways, have indicated they don't need the same numbers nor types of weapons that they needed during the cold war. But interest- ingly, many members of Congress, powerful members of Congress insist on buying weapons for their own reasons, weapons that the Pentagon doesn't need and does not want. The decision's up to the American public of where they want to spend their money in the years ahead.

Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.

[End of broadcast.]