136th Year... and
still on the job!
Thursday April 14,
2005
|
|
||
|
|
136th Year... and
still on the job!
|
Thursday April 14,
2005
|
Two leaders in the fight to get weapons destruction programs moving again in Colorado and Kentucky took to the Senate floor this week to argue their case.
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., delivered floor speeches Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, in support of an amendment they added to the Fiscal Year 2005 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill, which orders the Defense Department to resume work at both sites, stop its study of alternatives and block any transfers of money from the Pueblo and Blue Grass, Ky., projects to other sites.
On Monday, a week after the amendment was approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee, Allard and his junior Democratic colleague from Colorado, Ken Salazar, questioned Undersecretary of the Army Michael Wynne during a Senate subcommittee hearing. They were told the Army was still studying alternatives including shipping the weapons to another site instead of building destruction plants in Colorado and Kentucky and even dropping plans for water neutralization in favor of incineration.
The usually affable Allard took a hard line during his floor speech Tuesday.
"Since the program’s inception, the Department of Defense’s management has been dismal and ineffective," he said. "The program is behind schedule and over budget. In 1986, Congress was told that the program was going to be completed before 2007 at a cost of approximately $2.1 billion. And now, we are told the program could possibly cost as much as $37 billion and be completed as late as 2030.
"The Department of Defense has consistently failed to provide sufficient funding for this program, forcing those who run it to make programmatic decisions that pit demilitarization sites against each other.
"The Department of Defense has failed to provide adequate program management. It has repeatedly stopped and restarted design work and operations, adding huge startup costs and considerable schedule delays."
Allard said the Defense Department first ordered the project accelerated then, "without telling Congress, the state of Colorado, or the people in Pueblo, the department unilaterally decided to cease all design work and assign the project in Pueblo to care-taker status for the next six years.
"After six months of no activity, the Department of Defense changed its mind again. It ordered a study on whether the stockpile in Pueblo should be relocated to an operational incineration site, even though such an option is illegal under current law and has already been studied at least three times in the past. A month after that, the Department changed its mind again by ordering the start of preparatory construction and the redesign of the facility."
Allard complained that it has been hard to get straight answers out of the Defense Department. "One day I was told by Department officials that the stockpile would not be relocated outside of Colorado. The very next day, the Department ordered the study of transportation options," he said.
On Wednesday, McConnell called the Defense Department's behavior "schizophrenic."
"The Department has repeatedly stopped or slowed down design work and then restarted again, adding unnecessary startup and stop work costs," McConnell said. "They stingily parcel out appropriated monies in such small quantities that it is impossible to spend it efficiently. Thus, it is the Department’s own bureaucratic mismanagement that has created the cost problems."
Referring to a poster he brought to the floor with him, McConnell said, “Perhaps we should expect no less from an outfit whose operating maxim is printed on this board behind me. Dr. Dale Klein, the assistant to the secretary of defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs, admitted this in testimony last week before the House Armed Services Committee: ‘As I often tell people, some of our budgeting processes are accurate but incorrect.’
“I will leave it to someone else to figure out exactly what that means, but it does not fill me with confidence in the Department’s ability to resolve this issue. The Congress must pursue this matter if we ever want to see positive results."