Defense Seeking Greater Latitude

WASHINGTON —  Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is pushing a series of sweeping proposals that would weaken congressional oversight of the Pentagon and give the military more freedom to manage itself than ever before.

The Pentagon has proposed eliminating requirements for filing hundreds of reports on its activities to Congress every year. Pentagon officials also are drafting proposals to ban strikes by contract workers, eliminate federal personnel rules protecting civilian workers at the Pentagon and bypass environmentalists in Congress.

Some proposals are more provocative. They include allowing the Pentagon to send its initiatives directly to Capitol Hill before other agencies could review them. Once there, the legislation would require Congress to vote quickly, with only limited debate.

That “defense streamlining initiative” was quickly shelved after objections from officials within the administration itself, who decried the seeming chutzpah of a Pentagon trying to avoid the normal reviews. Drafted by the Office of Management and Budget at Rumsfeld’s request, senior administration officials say it is far from abandoned.

Indeed, administration officials say it is part of a grander plan that is very much in play--to relieve the Pentagon, and later other executive branch agencies, from oversight that Rumsfeld calls burdensome and inefficient, but which critics say is a necessary inconvenience of democracy.

The proposals, said a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity, are “the tip of the iceberg.”

“I don’t see it as an abdication of oversight, but it’s time to talk seriously about, in effect, resetting the table,” the senior official said. “We have an unprecedented challenge ahead of us in fighting terrorism, and it’s time for a longer-term discussion about roles and visions between the branches of government.”

Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is not likely to gain passage of any plan that significantly weakens congressional oversight, political leaders say. But the war on terrorism has given Rumsfeld a powerful platform, and his aides believe they can grab more control than the Defense Department has ever had.

And the proposals are testimony to the ambitious agenda of an administration that believes there are too many strings binding the powers of the executive branch and preventing sensible management of the federal bureaucracy.

On Capitol Hill, the proposals have already raised eyebrows.

“Most of these oversight devices have not sprung from the imagination of an overzealous Congress. They have a history” in the defense buildups of the Vietnam and Reagan eras, said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

“They came from the need for greater oversight on our part and greater clarity on the part of the [Defense Department]. As you spend more money and you spend more money on new systems, you want more oversight of those systems, more baselines to measure against, not fewer. It’s of concern to me that this administration is asking for more money but less accountability.”

The Rumsfeld Pentagon is hardly the first to complain about Congress. In an agency so immense, with a budget so vast, the tension between efficiency and oversight is persistent and inevitable. Every new administration vows to do something about it.

But the current effort stands out in several regards, according to senior administration officials and defense analysts.

It is driven by an administration that has been loath to share information with Congress and the public and has openly chafed at oversight, fueling suspicions about its motives on Capitol Hill.

Although previous Pentagon efforts have focused on cutting red tape and changing internal management practices, this initiative is part of a larger administration-wide effort to fundamentally alter the relationship between executive branch agencies and Congress, senior administration officials said.

“The interest was not restricted to DOD. The vice president was interested. The president was interested. But Secretary Rumsfeld did yeoman work in raising the attention level on a lot of concerns,” said NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, who as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget until last year was the point man on the initiatives that circulated among agencies last summer.

Critics say the administration’s sweeping agenda for change cries out for more oversight, not less.

“It is true that there are a lot of unnecessary reports to Congress that are a pain in the neck and don’t really mean much,” said Cindy Williams, former director of national security studies for the Congressional Budget Office. “On the other hand, this is an administration that for a year and a half has been consistently secretive about everything, and has a record of trying to preserve their secrets even from people within the government who should know them, so this has to be seen within that context.”

For Rumsfeld, the context is necessity. Although the war on terrorism has allowed him to highlight the military’s strengths, aides say he hopes his most lasting legacy will be trimming congressional oversight of the Pentagon and reforming how the Defense Department manages itself.

Deeply influenced by his experience as a business executive, Rumsfeld has repeatedly objected to the bureaucracy he says hampers action at the Pentagon. His concerns range from the mundane to the essential. He has called for an end to the lengthy financial disclosure statements he is required to file, for example, and expressed dismay at the time his employees spend answering to Congress.

A nettlesome Congress is not Rumsfeld’s only target. At his direction, Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim is spending $100 million to try to clean up the department’s famously muddled and inefficient financial management system. Other senior Pentagon officials are trying to reform the agency’s outmoded methods for acquiring weaponry and equipment and for managing its work force.

The Defense Department has more than 1,100 accounting systems, many of which don’t communicate with each other, Zakheim said. The Pentagon estimates that instituting a new financial management system could save $18 billion to $30 billion a year. Just by paying its operating bills on time, Zakheim says the Pentagon could save tens of millions of dollars in interest a year.

“It’s not that we are mismanaging the money. After all is said and done, ask the Taliban if we’re mismanaging our money,” Zakheim said. But “in terms of the ability to get the right information to the right level at the right time so we can make the right kinds of decisions, we don’t have it right now.”

Rumsfeld and his aides say they can do only so much to clean up their own house when they are under the congressional thumb.

“How do we engage this discussion without sounding like the Pentagon whining to the Hill about, ‘Leave us alone, we just want to do our own thing?’ ” asked a senior Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The question is, should the secretary of Defense have flexibility given changing circumstances to consider rearranging the executive management of the Office of the Secretary of Defense? One would say, yeah.”

To that end, they are trying to convince Congress to eliminate many of the more than 340 annual reports on everything from the Pentagon’s child-care center to its foreign military aid programs. The reports tie up Pentagon staffers but often go unread on Capitol Hill, Zakheim said.

The Pentagon’s concerns have not fallen on deaf ears. Last week, the House voted in its 2003 defense spending bill to eliminate 20 reports it has long required the Pentagon to file.

“It’s a start,” said Pete Geren, a former Republican congressman from Texas who is now special assistant to the secretary of Defense for legislative affairs. “The secretary sees these reports as indicative of the lack of trust between these two bodies. We want to reestablish that trust and get rid of the reports.”

But calling for less oversight and more money at the same time is guaranteed to rankle watchdogs in Congress. The House and Senate are on track to give the Pentagon close to the $400 billion it wants for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.

“Now, do we need all these reports? No, but we actually need better reports than we’re getting,” Spratt said. “I’m willing to work with them on anything like this, but gee whiz, when they’re asking for $400 billion, we have the right to ask for an accounting as they proceed to spend it.”

The Pentagon is also battling to exempt the military from key provisions of environmental legislation. The Pentagon wants exemptions under the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and hazardous waste laws. The military has long argued that environmental regulation inhibits critical training at bases across the country and offshore.

Separately, the Pentagon has been pushing Congress to give it more freedom to create executive positions without congressional approvals, which have been slow in coming.

Still on the drawing board at the Pentagon is a politically explosive proposal to bypass federal personnel rules that protect civil servants. Pentagon officials say 40% to 50% of the Pentagon’s civilian work force is eligible for retirement in the next seven years, providing a perfect opportunity to revamp a personnel management system they call outdated.

The Pentagon, for example, is seeking freedom to offer higher salaries to talented applicants and pay raises to top performers as part of a merit-based management system that would replace existing civil service regulations.

But they are not asking for more money for salaries overall, meaning pay raises for some would translate into pay cuts for others.

The existing rules aim to shield career government employees from political influence, granting many of them collective bargaining rights and other protections.

“To have people, who through no fault of their own have not been picked as a star, forgo annual pay raises in order to give big pay raises to the flavor of the week? It’s not right,” said Jacque Simon, director of public policy for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents much of the Pentagon’s civilian work force.

Administration officials said that of all the proposals, it is the defense streamlining initiative and others circulated last summer that met the fiercest objections.

Under one draft of the proposal, Pentagon legislation on administration and personnel issues, arms exports, maintenance of military depots and “defense environmental accountability” would be sent directly to the armed services committees, limiting perusal by other interested committees. The committees would have 15 days to consider the legislation. The draft legislation called for limiting debate and the use of procedural motions when considering the bill.

O’Keefe said the administration pulled back on the proposal after some administration lawyers brought up concerns that it would be unconstitutional and after “spirited discussions” with congressional leaders.

“It’s deep back burner, is my sense,” said one senior defense official of the initiative. The official said consensus within the administration is that getting such a proposal through Congress now would be “too hard.”

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this report.