Senator’s Legal Woes Unlikely To Affect U.S. Defense Spending

2 Aug 2007 // For years, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens has used his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to direct millions of dollars in military spending to his home state of Alaska. Both the state and defense companies big and small have benefited.
Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, is credited in recent years with securing C-130Js for the Coast Guard and a Stryker brigade for the Army — as long as they were based in Alaska. He has also added aid for Alaska’s fishing industry to defense bills.

Stevens’ defense budget earmarks for Alaska amounted to $210 million in 2007, $92.4 million in 2006 and $175.7 million in 2005, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Now Stevens is the target of multiple investigations. The FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Commerce Department and other agencies want to know where some of the money went.
But the federal probe is unlikely to hinder Stevens’ ability to funnel funds to the Last Frontier, congressional and defense sources say.

“The Senate’s not doing anything about Stevens,” said Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Senate leaders ignored a July 31 letter in which Sloan urged them to remove Stevens from the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he is the senior Republican on the defense subcommittee. Until January, he was chairman of that subcommittee, which drafts the annual defense budget.
As long as Stevens remains on the Appropriations Committee, where he has substantial influence over defense spending, nothing will change, Sloan said Aug. 1.

That may be heartening news to Alaskans. The good news for defense companies is that even if Stevens weren’t there to vote for big defense programs, then most everyone else on the Appropriations Committee would.

Stevens has long been “a major traffic cop for the money flow,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer, now director of the Straus Military Reform Project.

The Alaskan can be counted on to be “a super advocate of procurement of just about anything that is in the president’s budget request.” But getting approval from other Senate appropriators for most big military programs doesn’t require a lot of arm twisting, Wheeler said: “He facilitates their passage through an already willing Congress.”

If Stevens should be sidelined, “there are so many willing replacements for him that defense companies will never skip a beat,” Wheeler said.

“In general, it’s a weapon-system-friendly committee,” said a former defense industry lobbyist. “One less of the boys that likes a particular weapon system doesn’t much matter.”

“I don’t see Stevens’ legal situation as a factor” in how the 2008 defense budget turns out, agreed Scott Lilly, a former staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “The Defense Appropriations bill is really the collective work of a great many senators and a great many regional interests.”

Indeed, with the collegial atmosphere of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, it hardly matters which party controls the chair.

Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, took over from Stevens as chairman of the subcommittee this year because Democrats won control of the Senate.

When Stevens was subcommittee chairman and Inouye was the ranking minority member, the pair collaborated closely to shape the annual defense spending bill, said John Isaacs, a former congressional staffer.

Now, their roles are reversed, but the close relationship remains. Each looks out for the other.

“Stevens and Inouye are the two most successful porkers on Appropriations,” said Isaacs, who now heads the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “I would not expect major change” in how defense dollars are spent as a result of Stevens’ legal troubles, Issacs said.

But the investigations could become a deciding factor on whether Stevens runs for reelection in 2008, Isaacs said.