Followers of the annual National Defense Authorization Act will recall the kerfuffle that occurred earlier this year after lawmakers in both the House and Senate said they would keep earmarks out of FY12 spending bills. As for defense authorization—the bill that lays out the road map for the hundreds of billions spent by the defense appropriations bill—they promised it would stay clean as well. Interpretations of what that meant differed, however, and now that the FY12 defense authorization bill is on its way to the President’s desk, we can hold it up to the light.

When the House passed its version of the bill last May, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon came up with a process he said would allow lawmakers to add programs to the bill without earmarking. We were cautiously optimistic, but the process turned out to have some pretty major flaws. Senator Claire McCaskill released a 15-page report (using TCS data) this week showing that many of the projects amended to the bill under this process were in fact earmark replicants.

HASC staffers promised that none of the projects would remain in the final bill. Were they right? The bill report released late Monday night contains nearly 200 pages of tables tracking every dollar change from the original budget request through the House and Senate versions to the final. We searched the tables, and indeed the House earmarks were gone. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of money added to the bill, however. Some of the biggest additions:

·         $255 million for 49 Abrams tanks DOD didn’t ask for to keep the production line “warm”  

·         $200 million for a “Defense Rapid Innovation Program”

·         $150 million for ship depot maintenance

·         $110 million for collaborations with Israel, including the Arrow and David’s Sling programs

·         $50 million for Army test ranges and facilities

·         $40 million for “Impact Aid”

·         $30 million for the “Industrial Base Innovation Fund”

·         $30 million for the AEGIS missile defense program

Another disturbing trend: moving money from the Defense Department’s base budget into the “overseas contingency operations,” or wartime, budget account. This account is exempted from budget caps, so it’s an easy place to stash expensive programs. Congress moved more than $1.7 billion worth of programs into the wartime bill from procurement accounts alone. This does not bode well for efforts to rein in profligate defense spending.