The Fiscal Year 2013 defense spending bill heading to the House floor Wednesday is a lesson in why it’s so hard to cut defense spending even in times of shrunken pocketbooks.

Passed by the House Appropriations Committee last May, the bill provides the Defense Department (DOD) with a base budget of $519.2 billion, not including $88.5 billion for war costs. That’s $3.1 more than DOD asked for, by the way, and $1 billion more than the “megabus” spending bill Congress passed just a few months ago to fund the government this year. This despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office just declared DOD's five-year budget plans will exceed the limits established in the Budget Control Act passed last year. 

Then there’s what we call the “zombie earmarks.” These are earmarks that have shown up in bills for years and were disclosed as earmarks in FY08–the first year disclosures were required–before becoming absorbed back into the bill as “committee initiatives” (we wrote a bit on this last year, and Claire McCaskill used our data in a report on the subject).

One example of this phenomenon is a children’s education program called Starbase, which garners millions of extra dollars from lawmakers every year and was disclosed as a $4 million earmark in FY09 (why is DOD paying for children’s education? Not sure.) Other examples include “university research initiatives;” the bone marrow registry formerly known as C.W. Bill Young Marrow Donor Program; Anti-Submarine Warfare research; and “alternative energy initiatives”. One important but unanswered question is where these initiatives are located. During earmark disclosure years, lawmakers had to submit letters detailing their requests in which they would often name the universities and other initiative locations in their district. Now we don’t know where that money is going.

Other Congressional additions include some pretty big-ticket items that weren't explained in the report language. There’s $54 million for one Viper and one Venom helicopter to replace those lost in a collision during a U.S. training exercise. There's also about $150 million for “HD Full motion video” divided among several drone programs. Finally, there’s hundreds of millions sprinkled throughout the bill—particularly the operations and maintenance account—to “restore unjustified efficiency reduction” to activities like facilities and depot maintenance. Apparently lawmakers didn’t like this particular DOD effort to trim costs. Unfortunately, they haven’t embraced many other efforts either.