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OPINION:
We’ve all heard stories about how Uncle Sam pays $436 for a claw hammer, but if President Trump and Elon Musk are looking for Pentagon waste, they should begin their search on Capitol Hill. Congress directs unnecessary spending to benefit well-heeled and influential donors, friends and constituents.
Congress has supposedly banned “earmarks,” the provisions in appropriations bills directing money toward favored projects in members’ home districts and states.
Members of the House Appropriations Committee didn’t get the memo.
Case in point: Congress last year decreed that $21 billion should be spent for 1,072 separate program increases in the Pentagon’s procurement and research, development, test and evaluation accounts — most of which the Pentagon didn’t even ask for.
It gets worse.
In the yet-to-be-finalized fiscal year 2025 budget, lawmakers have proposed an additional 1,500 increases in the research and development accounts at more than $39 billion.
More than 72% of this spending is for projects the Pentagon didn’t request.
If the defense budget is approved, these are “backdoor earmarks,” and their collective cost will be $60 billion over two years.
Case in point: Buried deep in the 1,700 pages of the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act was a clause directing the Defense Department to “assess risks to the Department’s pharmaceutical supply chain.”
Somehow — perhaps thanks to the Congress members who initiated it or perhaps a nameless team of lobbyists — the assignment was blown out of proportion. Instead of assessing the drug supply chain, the Pentagon undertook a much bigger task: retesting the generic medicines sold to the Pentagon, medicines that have already been tested and approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
To conduct the testing, the Pentagon signed a “Cooperative Research and Development Agreement” with a New Haven, Connecticut, company calling itself “Valisure.” With just 20 employees and in business for less than 10 years, Valisure was given the job of retesting the generic medicines used by our troops.
The entire exercise is unnecessary; worse, Valisure’s choice was a serious blunder.
The driving force behind this redundant nonsense is Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the former chair and current ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. Don’t be surprised; Ms. DeLauro is Valisure’s hometown representative in Congress.
With an annual budget of about $7.2 billion, the FDA is the world’s “gold standard” for determining the safety and effectiveness of brand-name drugs and generics. To give the job of retesting the Pentagon’s generic medicines to the 20 employees at Valisure is almost laughable.
Valisure first made headlines in 2020 when it reported that the heartburn medicine Zantac contained the carcinogen NDMA. The finding led to Zantac’s recall in Europe and the United States and set off more than 75,000 lawsuits against the manufacturers.
The FDA subsequently found Valisure’s findings unreliable, partially because it failed to apply accepted testing methods.
Small wonder.
A federal court hearing, one of the class-action lawsuits against Zantac, determined that Valisure’s erroneous findings were discovered only after heating the medication to 266 degrees Fahrenheit. The FDA separately found that Valisure’s testing equipment had created the carcinogen NDMA.
When Valisure tested the product at temperatures closer to what a human would ingest, no NDMA was detected.
The Valisure case is not unusual, and Congress members like Ms. DeLauro can be counted on to return millions of dollars to favored constituents, donors and friends.
Ultimately, though, these costly backdoor earmarks are the work of an army of defense industry lobbyists.
According to OpenSecrets.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that tracks money in politics, the defense industry spent more than $139 million on lobbying in 2023, employing 904 lobbyists, three-quarters having worked in government, often as members of Congress or congressional staffers.
Over the past 10 years, the industry spent nearly $1.3 billion on lobbying to support its business interests.
This is in addition to $53.6 million in political contributions during the 2020 presidential election cycle and $34.8 million for the 2022 midterms.
These defense industry lobbying expenses are a big cause of why Pentagon spending has undergone a nearly 50% increase, adjusted for inflation, since 2000.
While the vast majority of the defense budget is legitimately focused on protecting the homeland, costly baubles like the Valisure contract have nothing to do with our national security. They are purely the product of the Washington swamp, and draining it will be a complex and politically perilous endeavor.
Good luck and Godspeed, Mr. Musk.
• Mark Pfeifle runs Off the Record Strategies, a crisis management firm in Washington. He was deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and global outreach at the White House from 2007 to 2009.
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