We’ve made a lot of progress on ridding the world of earmarks.

After the number of earmarks quintupled to more than 15,000 between 1996 and 2005 and several scandals, Congress knew the public was fed up. So, once the Democrats took control in 2007, they instituted a series of reforms intended to make earmarks more transparent and accountable. For the first time, Congress actually disclosed their earmarks. While we as taxpayers still had to dig through legislation to find any hidden treasures buried by lawmakers, disclosure was a step in the right direction.

When Republicans took control of the House in 2011, they went a step further and adopted a moratorium on earmarks. The President echoed the same in his State of the Union that year, declaring, “If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it. I will veto it.” Senate Republicans also adopted a moratorium, which led Senate Democrats to decide they would not pursue earmarks in the 112th Congress.

There we were. Two years and no scrambling for earmarks.

Unfortunately, Congress and the President haven’t spent the last two years figuring out how to drive the final nail in the earmark coffin. What we still don’t have are competitive, merit, or formula-based spending systems with transparent criteria and metrics that would allocate precious taxpayer dollars to the most effective and needed programs and projects, not the ones with the most political muscle.

There were steps in the right direction. The House Energy & Water appropriations committee created a possible model in their FY13 appropriations for the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation. They were, however, the exception rather than the rule.

So here we are at the same spot we were in 2010. Some folks are lamenting their inability to earmark. Others are trying to redefine earmarks by carving out special exceptions to the moratorium, like Rep. Don Young (R-AK) who was floating a proposal to change House Republican Conference rules to ban earmarks unless “the recipient of the earmark is a unit of local government.” So no earmarks except ones like the $200,000 for the city of Alexandria, Virginia’s Youth Building Green initiative or $250,000 for Harstelle, Alabama’s purchase of a Wireless Area Network. Thankfully, due to long-time earmark foe Speaker Boehner’s (R-OH) strong criticism, Young’s loophole proposal was pulled.

They say that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. We haven't forgotten the scandals surrounding super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, or the FBI’s investigation of several lawmakers about pay-to-play surrounding earmarks that ended up with a lobby firm shuttered and one lobbyist going to jail, former Rep. Duke Cunningham trading his pinstripes for prison stripes, or the most infamous earmark of all—the Bridge to Nowhere (which incidentally was a project of Rep. Don Young). Neither should Congress and the public.

The nation is approaching a fiscal cliff and is $16 trillion in debt. Now is not the time to bring back the backroom business as usual Washington that represented the go-go years of waste and brought us the challenges we face. Now is the time to get our budgetary house in order. Earmarks have no place in a government that works for taxpayers.

But this time has to be different. This isn’t 2008 where a Democratic congressional majority worked with a newly elected Democratic President claiming a mandate. This isn’t 2010 when a surging Republican majority saw their victory as a repudiation of 2008. The 2012 elections sent a group back that is a little more battered, bruised, and hopefully wiser.

The nation needs the new Congress to work. There is too much at stake. In the waning days of the 112th Congress, lawmakers are likely going to punt on the big fiscal cliff decisions, leaving it up to the new guys in January. But that’s when the punting has to stop. The can has been kicked to the end of the road. The country needs the policymakers to grow up and work together.

That’s where Taxpayers for Common Sense comes in. At seventeen years old, we may be just a teenager, but we’re the smart nerdy types. When we find a problem, we come up with a solution. It may not always be popular, it may be hard to swallow politically, but it’s right. We’ve been called the “hyphen” in left-right coalitions. We don’t care if you’re liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat or Independent, we’re ready to work with you if you’re ready to work to cut waste and get the American taxpayer what they deserve – a responsible federal government that lives within its means.

For example, Congress created a “Super Committee” to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. In our “Super Cuts for the Super Committee” report we gave them $1.5 trillion. Now with $1.2 trillion in sequestration – across-the-board cuts – looming after the Super Committee’s failure, we just gave policymakers $2 trillion in deficit reduction. And that was even without touching entitlements or fundamental tax reforms. But don’t worry, we’re not done yet. When you’re ready to listen, we’ve got common sense solutions for spending, tax, and entitlement reforms in the days and weeks to come.

With all the din and complexities surrounding these issues, Taxpayers for Common Sense’s ability to cut through the crap and tell the straight story is essential. While every D.C. special interest will be out there trying to protect their piece of the pie, as a voice for taxpayers, we’ll be out there demanding that Congress eliminate the parochial tax breaks and spending provisions.

Over the next two years, in addition to the major debates about tax reform, budgets, and entitlements, there will also be a fight over a $1 trillion farm bill, water projects, energy subsidies, earmarks (again!), defense spending, transportation spending, and the role and scope of government.

The American taxpayer deserves no less than your best effort to come up with common sense, bi-partisan solutions to our nation’s fiscal problems. It’s time to grow up and speak hard fiscal truths to not just ordinary taxpayers but to the special interests that walk the corridors of power and line your campaign coffers. We’re here Congress, and you can be sure that Taxpayers for Common Sense will be in the thick of it fighting for taxpayers.

How the nation responds to a natural disaster and how policymakers apply the lessons we learn to the projects, programs, and policies that are in place to protect us is critical. How did the storm and flood damage reduction projects perform during Sandy? What is the state of the infrastructure? Can it be made more resilient? Did the nation’s policies lead to behavior that made people and property less vulnerable?

Immediate calls after the winds of Sandy died down were to rebuild. Instead they should be to rebuild smarter and better. It is not an academic question as to whether the impacted areas are vulnerable to storms. Sandy decided that. Sandy also destroyed manmade storm and flood damage reduction projects like beach replenishment, dunes and berms, and levees. The American public, and by extension the American taxpayer, is extremely sympathetic to the plight of those who lost so much in Hurricane Sandy. At the same time, our big hearts cannot lead to soft heads.

Blanket federal spending can lead to reconstruction and rebuilding that isn’t in the community, the state, or the federal government’s best interest. The goal should be that if Sandy the sequel – or worse – were to strike, there would be far less damage and impact. That doesn’t mean that Manhattan or Atlantic City or other communities are not rebuilt, it means that they are constructed to be more resilient, with high risk properties being removed, structures storm proofed or elevated, and flood and storm protection adapted to the natural conditions.

We also need policy reform. The federally subsidized flood insurance program was $17 billion in the hole to taxpayers before Sandy hit. The program has about $4 billion in cash on hand and additional borrowing authority from the treasury. It’s very likely that the cap on borrowing will have to be lifted to pay all the claims from Sandy. Any increased borrowing should come with additional reforms to further protect taxpayers and put the program on sounder financial footing. So what if it was already reauthorized for five years this past summer. The reforms in that package that would begin to charge policyholders rates that were more actuarially sound and therefore commensurate with their risks, could be accelerated. Another reform that was stripped out at the last minute would have required property owners living in the floodplain to purchase flood insurance that takes into account the residual risk that remains even if they have flood protection like a levee. Because flood control projects reduce, they don’t eliminate risk. We can guarantee you that a lot of flooded property owners are not going to be happy that absent flood insurance, they are only eligible for a small amount of emergency disaster aid and loans.

Particularly in the context of sea level rise, the nation has to revisit our storm damage reduction programs. The federal taxpayer picks up two-thirds of the cost of pumping sand onto beaches to protect property. And then we pay to do it again, and again, and again for the fifty year life span of these projects. The federal role in beach renourishment should be reduced. Instead of protecting people, these federal programs encourage people to live in high risk areas.

Let’s face it. Disasters happen. No amount of projects, policies, and programs are going to prevent them. But we can help people and property be less vulnerable, less at risk to the vagaries of nature. To do that we have to spend and invest wisely, and most of all, not subsidize people to live in harm’s way.

November 1^st brings no respite from Halloween fright, because that’s when USDA releases final crop prices used to calculate federal crop insurance payouts. Under this program, taxpayers subsidize production of more than 120 different crops covering 282 million acres. Most of its cost is tied up in policies that don’t insure against a loss of crops, but actually guarantee high levels of income through “revenue protection” policies.  

The price tag will be scary big. Harvest prices have been hovering around $7.50 per bushel for corn and $15.50 for soybeans, the most highly subsidized crops. That's double the price from just four years ago, and for corn, $2 more than what was even expected at planting.

Record crop prices mean the crop insurance program will have a record high cost for taxpayers. When Congress passed the 2008 farm bill, crop insurance was projected to cost $6.8 billion this year. The price tag now will easily be $15 billion, though it could rise depending on market conditions.

Federal crop insurance masquerades as a free market program—private crop insurance companies sell and administer policies purchased by farmers and ranchers—but closer inspection reveals a government program. The government approves both the companies that sell crop insurance and the policies that they can sell (which don’t differ between companies). Taxpayers paid $1.4 billion last year to 15 private companies to administer the program. We also cover the majority of losses—last year, insurance companies made $1.7 billion in underwriting gains while taxpayers lost $500 million. Oh, and taxpayers also subsidize crop insurance premiums, contributing an average of 62 cents for every 38 cents an individual producer pays, to the tune of $7 billion this year.

Yet much of this is unnecessary. For all the drought scares, the agriculture sector is expected to enjoy a record $122 billion in profits this year. And plenty of subsidized crops, from pistachios to peanuts to pumpkins are having banner years.

But for farm state lawmakers and agriculture special interests, it’s not enough. Like zombies after brains, they have an insatiable appetite for taxpayer dollars.

Much like sixth-graders on a sugar high, many lawmakers want to use the post-election lame duck session to ram through a trillion dollar farm bill. This bloated bill has morphed into a witch’s brew of special interest giveaways. But instead of wool of bat and eye of newt, the cauldron’s filled with marketing loans for wool from goats and margin insurance for producers of catfish. Rather than restrain, it actually expands crop insurance including special carve-outs for popcorn, peanut, and poultry producers. All while creating new “shallow loss” entitlements that pay farmers who experience just a five or ten percent drop in expected revenue.

Washington should untangle the complex web of agricultural subsidies, not pile on new treats for the favored. They should finally slay “temporary” programs, like direct payments, that keep rising from the dead. The poltergeist of government mandated crop prices, taking the latest form of Price Loss Coverage in the House bill, should be eliminated. And they should exorcise the demons of old farm bills by repealing the outdated 1939 and 1947 legislation that is still on the books and often used as scare tactics to jam through new farm bills.

Taxpayers deserve policies that say no to ghosts of farm bills past and provide producers with a limited, effective, and efficient farm safety net. The days of ghoulish legislation wasting taxpayer dollars on profitable agribusinesses must be laid to rest.

TCS Quote of the Week:

"I don't think we're going off that cliff. ... When it's 48 hours from going home for Christmas we can do about anything."

- Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA), commenting on a potential last minute deal by Congress to avoid the upcoming automatic budget cuts. (Bloomberg)

Two recent – but unrelated – decisions from the Golden State are likely to have wide-ranging implications for the nation’s transportation systems, and are important developments for taxpayers to watch in coming years. First, California got the go-ahead on the 130-mile first phase of its controversial high-speed rail (HSR) system; less than a week later, it passed legislation at the state level to allow the on-street use of autonomous – or self-driven – automobiles.

We have pilloried the HSR plan as little more than California Dreamin’. The plan has a number of significant, well-documented flaws: the chosen route through the Central Valley is circuitous; the cost estimate (which started around $40 billion, then went to $98 billion, and now rests at $68 billion) is shaky, at best; and the funding sources are unknown (the California High-Speed Rail Authority expects between $40 and $50 billion in federal funds, yet Congress has shown no appetite in recent years for funding HSR).

All of this makes approval of the project’s first phase that much more concerning. Federal taxpayers put $3.2 billion on the line for a train that will run from Madera to Bakersfield; it would be many more years before the line made it all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles, as intended. This first phase is currently estimated to open a decade from now at the earliest, in 2022. And with limited future funding identified for the project’s later phases, we run the risk of a multi-billion dollar line with very limited transportation benefit.

Just six days after the HSR announcement, California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that will lead to driverless cars on California’s roads and highways. California was not the first state to take this step – Nevada and Florida both have similar laws – but by virtue of the size of the state and the involvement of Silicon Valley, this could be a vital one to move this technology forward.

Driverless cars and high-speed rail are nearly opposite transportation approaches. For example, California’s HSR project will cost taxpayers untold billions, while the driverless car concept is entirely a private – and most importantly, unsubsidized – enterprise. Google, in addition to the world’s major automobile manufacturers, are leading the way. In addition, implementation of driverless cars (which some estimate are much closer to reality than most of us might think – a decade away, perhaps) have the potential to actually save us untold billions. Cars that can drive very close to each other, as driverless cars would, could decrease congestion and make building new roads unnecessary. This would also be a far more efficient way to drive, which could decrease gasoline use and therefore be environmentally beneficial. And perhaps most importantly, this technology – some of which is already in use today – will continue to help improve the safety of our roads.

None of this is to say that autonomous vehicles are the future of travel, or that HSR doesn’t have its place as part of a diverse transportation system. But, as we’ve seen time and again, government is particularly bad at picking winners and losers. Taxpayers are being asked to make a huge investment in high speed rail. If, as is often the case, the costs of the project are understated and the demand for the project is overstated, the investment is likely to look even more dismal. Furthermore, politics of the day often drive construction decisions and locations, adding to costs. Finally, the worst of all would be to see a portion of the project built, but not the entire line, so the benefits of the project would be even more limited.

On the other hand, Google and other private companies are making an investment in driverless car technology because they believe it will be a winner. And they have a track record of picking winners more often than not. But if Google fails, which it has done before (does anyone remember Google Wave?), it won’t be taxpayers who are on the hook for the losses.

No one knows what is going to happen tomorrow, of course, but we did get a glimpse of our transportation future in these two decisions in California. Time will tell if these rushes for California gold end up as booms or busts.
 

You would hope the folks overseeing our nuclear weapons arsenal would be conscientious, able to handle delicate instruments and fissile materials. Yet the way they handle our money makes us fear they shouldn’t be anywhere near a power switch, much less a ticking budget bomb or fiscal cliff.

We’re talking about the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy agency charged with the care and feeding of our nuclear arsenal. Anyone with a passing knowledge of NNSA knows it's screwed up, but recent events have pushed the situation from bad to worse. Let’s revisit just the latest disasters:

• Last week, NNSA officials admitted the Uranium Processing Facility at Tennessee’s Y-12 nuclear plant—the projected costs of which have ballooned from $600 million to $6.5 billion—must be redesigned because the building as planned won’t accommodate the facility’s required equipment. This is just the latest disaster in a trend of NNSA launching construction projects before designs are finalized.
• On September 26 of this year, the DOE Inspector General reported that efforts to refurbish the W-76 warhead will take longer and cost $221 million more than originally projected. Furthermore, cost increases are expected to continue due to production delays.
• That same week, contractors estimated the Mixed Oxide Fuel Program at NNSA’s Savannah River site in South Carolina would also need another $2 billion. The original cost of the facility, which is almost a decade behind schedule, has tripled to nearly $5 billion. Let’s also keep in mind that this is a program to produce a product that currently no one wants to buy.
• Earlier this summer, the Pentagon revealed that the cost of another refurbishing effort for the B-61 warhead had nearly doubled from $6 billion to $10 billion, causing Senate Energy and Water Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to say, “we have to find a way to stop [cost overruns] from happening.”
• In February this year, NNSA put the $5 billion Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility—a huge building at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that would refurbish plutonium pits for warheads—on ice indefinitely after cost and schedule overruns.

And we won’t even go into NNSA’s failure this year to turn in budget plans, the break-in by activists into the Y-12 complex this summer, or the $5 billion laser at California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory—the most expensive federal science project ever—that missed its October deadline to prove it can work.

NNSA has been on the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk list for years, yet change is never anywhere in sight. Why? Is NNSA set up to fail because of its location in DOE, which has a different mission? Is it hamstrung by excessive oversight, as lab officials claim, or skating by with too little? Is the science so complicated that policymakers’ eyes glaze over instead of conducting oversight? Or could it be that the contractors who actually run the place are getting off too easy?

DOE is the largest federal contracting client outside of the Defense Department: Nearly 90 percent of its $26 billion annual budget goes to contractors. NNSA accounts for nearly 40 percent of DOE’s budget, and the laboratories and production plants that comprise the national nuclear weapons “complex” are actually operated and managed by private corporations. The arrangements these corporations work under, known as “Government-Owned, Contractor Operated” contracts or “GOCOs,” have done nothing to lessen NNSA’s persistent problems of inflated overhead costs, security breaches, and construction cost overruns, and in some cases actually increased them.

Lawmakers and the administration have to reexamine these arrangements as they look for savings. The Cold War ended twenty years ago, so we’re past due to rein in the $11 billion we spend each year on nuclear weapons. The nation is slated to spend $640 billion on the nuclear complex over the next decade, according to some estimates. With a $16 trillion debt and annual budget deficits exceeding a trillion dollars, it’s time to take some bombs off of NNSA’s hands.

TCS Quote of the Week:
 

“I think that’s difficult to do … You know, and frankly, I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do — have a lot of retiring members and defeated members voting on really big bills. Eh, probably not the appropriate way to handle the lame duck.”

- Representative John Boehner (R-OH), Speaker of the House, on the potential for a deficit deal before the end of the year. (Politico)

TCS Quote of the Week:

“Both sides seem to have a political strategy, but their governing strategy is in doubt”

- Former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), commenting on Congressional strategy to address the upcoming automatic budget cuts at a recent conference. (The Fiscal Times)

So while the Postal Service is trying to figure out ways to stay afloat, lawmakers are restricting their ability to close post offices with low volume and preventing them from reducing service to five days a week. But you can be sure there will be a lot of criticism hurled – some of it deserved – at the waste and inefficiencies of the U.S. Postal Service during the so-called Postal Reform bill debate in the lame duck session after the election.

Amtrak is a perennial recipient of attacks and the money losing passenger train service does underperform, particularly outside the Northeast corridor. And while we agree with House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman John Mica (R-FL) that charging $9.50 for a burger that actually costs taxpayers $16.00 is a problem, the bigger problem is that Congress prevents Amtrak from shutting down enormous money-loser lines like the Sunset Limited between Los Angeles and New Orleans and the California Zephyr between Chicago and San Francisco.

Many lawmakers are calling for the Pentagon to actually pass an audit (hasn’t happened yet, their books are in such a shambles that they’re not even auditable!) but others are actively fighting to keep the assembly lines of their favored weapon systems humming. So what if the military has said they don’t need the politically-favored planes or tanks. With budget tightening, another round of base closing through BRAC (Base Closure and Realignment Commission) seems to be in order, unless of course you happen to be a member of Congress.

As we sift through spending bills each year, we see numerous restrictions placed on the federal government through so-called limitations provisions. By their own rules, lawmakers technically can’t adjust policy in annual must-pass spending bills, because it isn’t germane – relevant – to the dollars and cents. However, these legislative riders are designed to stop the executive branch from doing something by denying them funding for the activity. For example, technically an Army Corps of Engineers’ district office could be closed, but the government can’t spend any money to accomplish it (including staff time) so, in effect, they can’t close the office. Another tactic is you make closing a Farm Service Agency office contingent on endless study, ensuring that closing just 125 out of the more than 2200 is an impossible task.

Probably one of the biggest sucker punches for government is the continuing resolution (CR). Congress passes these stop-gap measures to keep government running when lawmakers can’t get their act together and pass the twelve bills that fund everything from congressional operations to the Department of Defense. These temporary bills limit agency spending to the previous year levels and prevent proper planning on hiring, acquisitions, and operational expenditures. They can be as short as a few days or several months.

In two instances in recent memory (FY2007 and FY2011), a succession of CRs were used to temporarily fund government for a whole year. In the 72 months since the start of fiscal year 2007, all or much of government has been operating under a CR for 39 of them. Congress just passed another CR to deal with October 1st start of FY13 while they run home and campaign. When that CR expires March 30, 2013, all or much of government will have operated under a CR for 58% of the time since the start of fiscal year 2007.

That’s no way to run a railroad. And it guarantees that government will be ineffective and wasteful. That doesn’t mean it would be perfect otherwise. Far from it. But it does make it hard to plan and to put in place reforms, restructuring, and programs to make government work.

Lawmakers in glass houses shouldn’t thrown stones. It’s past time for lawmakers to set down their parochial pet rocks, do their job, and help make government more efficient and cost-effective.

TCS Quote of the Week:

“At the end of the day, politicians represent their constituencies but they have this broader and higher mandate of representing the entire country. If the economy of the country goes south, it is not helpful to the country at large. And every politician wants jobs to be created in their constituencies; they want the economy to pick up; and they want growth to accelerate rather than decelerate. I think they need to see the global side of things effecting them … we are all linked in this.”

- Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, referring to Congress' need to develop a responsible long-term plan to address the so-called fiscal cliff. (MarketPlace)

Of course it doesn’t have to be this way, and in fact it wasn’t meant to be this way. The expiring tax cuts were punted to the end of 2012 the last time they were set to expire at the end of 2010. Sequestration – a fancy budget wonk term for across-the-board cuts – was supposed to be the scary teeth that would have gotten a “Super Committee” of House and Senate, Republican and Democratic lawmakers to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction last year. Evidently the teeth were not sharp enough, because here we are.

There’s a lot of debate over extending all or a subset of all the tax breaks, and it’s not clear that the election will put that to rest. Ideally, this whole package would become the domain for fundamental tax reform, or even better some of these being used in a “grand bargain” that would defuse sequestration.

So what it is this evil sequestration and how does it work? For something as straightforward sounding as across-the-board cuts, it’s pretty tricky.

In an attempt to motivate the Super Committee to work together, Congress made it clear that (almost) every special interest would take a hit. The goal was $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over nine years, and any savings gained by the Super Committee would reduce the total to be cut. They didn’t save diddly, so $1.2 trillion it is. First, you assume that interest payments on cash borrowed in the future are reduced because cutting spending reduces future borrowing. That shaves $216 billion off the total. Only $984 billion to go. Next, divide by nine (FY13-FY21) and you get $109.3 billion per year. The law says half of that cut is to the non-defense side of the ledger, the other from defense. Certain areas like Social Security are exempt and Medicare gets only a two percent cut. From FY14 on, there is a cap on discretionary spending levels (the amount Congress and the Administration play with every year) and an across-the-board sequestration (percentage cut) of mandatory spending (some farm payments, some road project funding, and many other discrete accounts within agencies) to achieve the revised total spending level.

FY13 is different than the remaining eight years because a quarter of the fiscal year will be over by the time sequestration kicks in January 2, 2013, and money will have been spent in the first quarter at a level higher than the sequester allows. So, the Office of Management and Budget will cut a certain percentage of spending in the discretionary and mandatory accounts to get the requisite savings in the defense and non-defense areas to catch up. That’s why 2013 will be such a shock if sequestration kicks in. Indiscriminate across-the-board whacks cut defense discretionary spending by more than nine percent and non-defense by more than eight.

So there it is, in under 300 words. That’s the mess the nation is facing 24 hours after the ball drops in Times Square in three months or so.

Lawmakers and the administration complain about the idiocy of sequestration and how it is irresponsible to let it occur as if sequestration dropped from the sky without warning. They’re right. It is irresponsible. In fact the only thing that would be more irresponsible is to simply undo it and ignore the deep budgetary hole we’re in. The markets were jittery last summer when a final deal to raise the debt ceiling was struck (that’s what gave us the Super Committee and sequestration). To not follow through on what the nation’s leaders promised to do is inexcusable. So how about this: cut spending and raise revenue in a smart and targeted way to reduce the deficit by trillions of dollars. Here’s one plan we at Taxpayers for Common Sense came up with, but Congress, feel free to use the Domenici-Rivlin plan, or the Simpson-Bowles plan, or put your heads together and come up with a new plan. Just do it.



TCS Quote of the Week:

“The inability of so many political leaders today to step outside their ideological cocoons … has become the real threat to America’s future.”

- Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates during an event on national security and debt earlier this week. (The Hill) 
 

The very same day that the House took up a bill to fund the government for another six months—a stopgap measure to kick funding decisions for fiscal year 2013 to the next Congress—it passed legislation introduced by Representative Allen West (R-FL) that would put the brakes on the defense spending cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act (BCA), itself a stopgap measure.

The irony behind this bill, titled the “National Security and Jobs Protection Act,” is threefold. First, Rep. West—along with many of the bill’s supporters-- was among the 343 members of Congress who passed the BCA last year. Second, the bill was debated amidst a flurry of hearings and reports on waste in the Pentagon budget. Finally, the bill prescribes the very same kind of government-sponsored economic stimulus that Rep. West and many other lawmakers despise.

Rep. West says he voted for the BCA to stop the President from receiving “a blank check to continue his spending binge.” His new bill—which the Senate won’t touch and the White House vowed to veto—would lower the BCA’s cap on discretionary funds while removing the “firewall” between defense and non-defense spending. That means the Pentagon would get off the hook while non-defense agencies like transportation and energy take a bigger hit. Similar proposals have been fielded by lawmakers including Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who argues the cuts would weaken our national security.

Yet on the same day the bill reached the House floor, the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee held a hearing on a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report that records of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of fuel in Afghanistan had gone missing. The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) simultaneously held a hearing on deadly cockpit malfunctions in the F-22 Raptor, a ridiculously expensive white elephant aircraft that some members of Congress are trying to revive after its cancellation three years ago. Wednesday saw another HASC hearing on waste in Pentagon contracting, followed by one on Friday questioning DOD’s slow progress toward achieving an audit. Oh, and the National Research Council reported that missile defense—the most expensive defense program ever at $200 billion and counting—is a flop.

Defenders of the effort to skirt the sequestration they themselves adopted a little over a year ago were blithely unaware of these developments. Indeed, the debate devolved into a partisan fight over the role of government in job creation. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) briefly touched on sequestration’s impact on national security, but spent the bulk of his floor time complaining about its effect on jobs in his district, down to the grocer who provides produce to military bases. The contradiction inherent in his arguments—that government-driven jobs programs are bad unless they involve defense—seemed lost on him. You can’t have it both ways.

There’s a simple fix for sequestration. In fact, it’s written right in the BCA: Adopt $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. We came up with $1.5 trillion last year and in a few weeks will release billions more (keep reading your Wastebasket). Furthermore, if lawmakers really want to stop blank checks for spending binges, they should start with the Pentagon, not stop short of it. Any fiscal plan that refuses to take on a budget that has more than doubled in the past decade, constitutes nearly 60 percent of our discretionary spending and is rife with waste to boot is not just inefficient, it’s dangerous. Our economic strength is our first line of defense, and the best way to protect it is to make every part of government vigilant against waste.