After a massive investigation, a technical problem was found to be the cause and quickly remedied. The missiles had never been outside our control or at risk. I told the president in early November that new regulations were in place providing that in the event of any future problem involving the nuclear force, the national military command center at the Pentagon would be informed within ten minutes, and both the chairman and secretary notified within fifteen minutes of the event. It would be my decision whether to inform the president. It was a sure bet I’d make the call.
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
Two wars and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” notwithstanding, I spent more time on the defense budget in 2010 than on any other subject. For all the bleating from Congress about defense acquisition reform, tighter management, reducing waste, and auditable accounting, they made it nearly impossible to manage the Pentagon efficiently. I oversaw the execution or preparation of six defense budgets, and not one was enacted by Congress before the beginning of the fiscal year. Every year we had to operate for anywhere from a few months to an entire calendar year under a “continuing resolution,” which, in the absence of an enacted appropriations bill, meant we received exactly the same amount of money as the previous fiscal year, without authority to start any new program. Such madness played havoc with acquisition programs. We were left in a state of near-perpetual financial uncertainty.
On several occasions, political fights over the continuing resolutions led us to the precipice of government shutdowns. Warnings of civilian furloughs had to be issued, and we had to interrupt countless programs and initiatives. Under these ridiculous circumstances, when we had to move money from one account to another to cover a dire shortfall, regardless of the amount, we had to get the approval of four congressional committees; a single hostile staff member could gum up the works for weeks. Congress had no problem expeditiously voting in favor of National Pickle Week, but one task it had to do under the Constitution—appropriate money in a timely way—seemed beyond its grasp. Even eliminating wasteful or obsolete programs was almost always a monumental political lift on the Hill, as I learned in 2009. And each year we would get a defense authorization bill from the Armed Services Committees that contained about a thousand pages of nearly paralyzing direction, micromanagement, restrictions, and demands for reports. You can imagine why congressional complaints about inefficient management at the Pentagon rang very hollow with me. The legislature played its own significant part in making it so.
For three years, I had endured this congressional incompetence with public equanimity and patience. But I was coming to the end of my tether. Because of the growing effort it took to maintain self-discipline, I increasingly resisted going to the Hill to testify or even to meet with members. Throughout my tenure, before every hearing I held meetings with my staff ostensibly to work through answers to likely questions from members of Congress. Actually, the meetings were more an opportunity for me to cathartically vent, to answer the anticipated questions the way I really wanted to, barking and cursing and getting the anger and frustration out of my system so that my public testimony could be dispassionate and respectful. New members of my staff were sometimes shocked by these sessions, fearful that I would repeat in the hearing what I had just said privately. By 2010, the effectiveness of even these sessions was wearing off. Cuffed and shackled, my heel marks visible in the hallway, I would be dragged to the car and hauled before the people’s elected representatives. At least that’s how I felt. Robert Rangel warned another member of my team, “You need to give hard counsel to the secretary—that is, telling him to do things when he doesn’t want to.” He had to be referring to visiting Capitol Hill.
During the first months of 2010, as usual for a secretary, I was dealing with three annual budgets simultaneously—executing the FY2010 budget; defending the proposed FY2011 budget, presented in February; and preparing the FY2012 budget. Beginning with the significant program cuts and caps I announced in April 2009 for the 2010 budget, I was determined to use my remaining time in office to try to shape these budgets to create the versatile military I thought we would need. I also wanted to build on our 2009 success in cutting wasteful and unnecessary programs and activities. However, as I looked at the ever more complex and turbulent world beyond our borders, and remembered history, I had no intention of cutting the defense budget. I readily admit it. As I looked to FY2011 and 2012, what I very much wanted to do was cut bureaucratic overhead and invest the money thus saved in additional and new military capabilities. I continued to hope, as pressures to cut the federal budget deficit built, that if the department operated in this manner, we could avoid the kind of drastic reductions in defense spending that had followed the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War.
When Congress got around to passing a defense appropriations bill for FY2010 in December 2009 (two and a half months into the fiscal year), they gave us a base budget of $530 billion, $5 billion less than the president’s request but still about a 4 percent increase, including inflation. (When asked at one point by a reporter whether I was “gutting defense,” I retorted, “In what parallel universe are you living where a four percent increase in the defense budget is a cut?”)
For everyone in the executive branch except the president, the Office of Management and Budget is the villain. It recommends to the president how much each agency and department should spend, and it’s always lower than the request, sometimes a lot lower in the case of the State Department. Of course, if everyone got what he wanted, we would have a deficit far bigger than the one we have. Defense was no exception. As we worked on the FY2011 budget, OMB director Peter Orszag was telling us to plan for no budget growth beyond the rate of inflation for 2011 and several years beyond that. OMB and I were, shall we say, far apart.
(I shared with Rahm Emanuel a story about the time during the Reagan administration when all the deputy cabinet and agency heads met for dinner at the Justice Department and beforehand saw a live demonstration of the FBI’s hostage rescue unit, with the lights going out and the unit walking among us firing blanks at “terrorist” targets. I told everyone afterward I thought it could have been played as a scene right out of Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express, with the murder victim the deputy director of OMB because everyone in the room would have had a motive for killing him.)
I had several arguments to justify the budget growth we requested. We had already made significant program cuts in 2009, more extensive than ever before, cutting many large programs that were weak, wasteful, or unnecessary. Because no other department had done anything comparable—even proportionately—we deserved some consideration for that. Moreover, our costs rose inexorably. Year in and year out, Defense health care costs would rise $4 billion, military pay raises would cost an additional $3 billion, fuel inflation another $4 billion—in short, the military’s basic overhead and operating costs would rise by about $13–$15 billion even if we didn’t add a dime for existing or new programs. A broad range of equipment bought during the Reagan years—particularly ships and aircraft—had not been replaced during the defense budget downturn in the 1990s and early 2000s and were coming to the end of their useful lives. After ten years of war, much of our equipment was worn out and would need to be refurbished or replaced. Even the further reductions in overhead I was planning would be inadequate to cover these costs.