136th Year... and still on the job!	Sunday October 10, 2004

Sen. Wayne Allard

Senator blocks transfer of weapons authority

THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congressional conference committees have approved a defense budget that will keep control of the chemical weapons destruction program under the control of the secretary of defense.

Conference committees have approved the bill and it is expected to be passed by the full Congress soon.

Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said that he was able to block a Department of Defense proposal to transfer oversight of the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives Program from the office of the secretary of defense to the Department of the Army that was included in the House version of the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2005.

"As a member of the Senate-House conference on the defense authorization bill, I was able to convince my colleagues in both the Senate and the House that this proposal was ill-conceived, ill-timed, and ill-considered," Allard said.

"Senior DoD officials messed up this program and shouldn’t be let off the hook for their failures," he said. "Trying to get out of their duties by passing the buck to the Army was irresponsible and deserved to be shot down by Congress.

"Their failure, in particular, to provide full funding for the chemical demilitarization project at Pueblo just confirmed in my mind and the minds of my colleagues that Congress needed to hold the department’s feet to the fire."

Under current law, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, an official who reports directly to the secretary of defense, is required to provide oversight for the program, which uses a water-based biological method to destroy weapons instead of incineration.

The Pueblo and Blue Grass, Ken., chemical demilitarization projects are managed under ACWA. The Army is currently responsible for managing the chemical materials agency, which oversees all other chemical destruction sites.

Allard said, "The Army already has too much to do. Many of the Army’s sites are behind schedule and over-budget, adding two more mismanaged sites to the Army’s long list of troubled chemical demilitarization projects would only have ensured that Pueblo got the short end of the stick again in the future."