.Aggressive, Coordinated Effort Led to F-22's Demise
The most remarkable thing happened in Washington this past Tuesday.
Congress scrapped the F-22 stealth fighter jet, killing off a 30-year-old Pentagon hardware program that employs 25,000 people in 46 states.
It was a dogfight almost to the end over $1.75 billion and the need to remake military readiness. Threats and promises, blunt talk and grand gestures -- all were deployed to support an appeal to common sense and for urgent change, according to principals involved. The White House coordinated the ultimately successful vote-wrangling, and its specific tactics may show up again in another epic battle now unfolding: getting Congress to draft and pass health-care reform.
For years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has argued strenuously against the F-22s as Cold War relics, too inefficient and expensive to warrant building any more than the 187 already in the fleet. He cut the Air Force's F-22 funding request of $400 billion, for 20 more, to zero.
He bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build more F-22s. Lockheed Martin's chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, told employees he supported Gates's call "to put the interests of the United States first -- above the interests of agencies, services and contractors." That left the powerful lobbyists to sit on their hands.
But lawmakers had all those jobs on the line in their districts, and in a lousy economy. Republicans and Democrats alike defied Gates and the White House. In June, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 13 to 11 to shift the $1.75 billion from other programs.
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the committee's ranking Republican, and Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) fought back with an amendment to the defense budget bill to strip that funding out. Then the two senators, Gates and White House officials started looking for 51 votes.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called an old Chicago pal just back from a honeymoon in Italy. He asked for a favor: Could Bill Daley quickly pull together a full house at the Economic Club of Chicago if Gates were to come and deliver a forceful speech about military readiness and how the F-22 was a bad idea?
"I said we would love to do that," said Daley, a former commerce secretary. "I got hold of the [club's] president. We sent out a blast e-mail," and about 800 members, including several executives of Boeing, headquartered in Chicago, were on hand about two weeks later, on July 16, to listen politely.
"And we got great play," said Daley, with much media coverage of Gates's remarks and his forceful comments to reporters after the speech. It was exactly what the White House wanted.
Meanwhile, President Obama vowed to veto any bill funding the F-22s. "We do not need these planes," he wrote in letters on July 13 to McCain and Levin.
When a showdown vote loomed on July 15, Senate Democratic leaders who backed Obama's effort to scuttle the program did not think they had the votes to win. There was opposition in their own caucus: Sen. Patty Murray wanted the F-22 funding (and ultimately supported it in the final Senate vote, as did her fellow Democratic senator from Washington and the two Democratic senators from California). There were only about 20 votes that could be counted on to scrap the F-22 program, and even with those undecided and leaning, "we didn't crack 50," a Senate aide said.
So they put off the vote by shifting attention to a provision in the defense bill to expand protections under laws against hate crimes. That gave the Obama administration several days to restart its lobbying effort to win the vote. That afternoon, the administration, in a statement from the Office of Budget and Management, repeated the veto threat, emphasizing the point by underlining the sentence.
"People had to ask: Did we want this to be the first time he vetoed a bill from Congress?" said one senior Democratic Senate aide.
With several days now to organize opposition to the plane's funding, Gates started calling members of Congress. Vice President Biden called his old friend, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), Inouye said. The vice president called at least two other senators and asked for their votes, and Obama called Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), said a senior administration official. National security adviser Gen. James Jones made calls, as did Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn.
On the day before the vote, Gates called Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to push him to support stripping the funding. Some of the plane's components are produced in Massachusetts, but Gates told Kerry of the importance of the vote and said the F-35 would continue to be produced, employing workers in the state. In a later call with Emanuel, Kerry said Gates had answered all his questions.
"The president pulled out all of the stops," said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who was pushing for additional funding for the plane.
Another advocate for funding the plane, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), said the lobbying effort included calling Republicans, because Obama "had a lot riding on this vote."
On Tuesday, aides in the White House's legislative affairs office, all former key aides to powerful congressmen, swarmed the Hill to collar votes. Emanuel sent some of his own staff members to help and to provide key intelligence directly to him back in the White House.
After the Senate voted 58 to 40, two votes fewer than would have been required to fund the program, Obama and the man he defeated in last year's presidential contest both hailed the outcome, using strikingly similar language.
"It really means there's a chance that we can change the way we do business here in Washington," said McCain, who long has had a deep disdain for the F-22 program.
The outcome of the fight is "a good example of us starting to change habits in Washington," Obama said.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who had worked the $1.75 billion into the $680 billion defense spending bill, was left to grumble that he had never seen a White House lobby as hard for anything as this one did.
WaPo
Congress scrapped the F-22 stealth fighter jet, killing off a 30-year-old Pentagon hardware program that employs 25,000 people in 46 states.
It was a dogfight almost to the end over $1.75 billion and the need to remake military readiness. Threats and promises, blunt talk and grand gestures -- all were deployed to support an appeal to common sense and for urgent change, according to principals involved. The White House coordinated the ultimately successful vote-wrangling, and its specific tactics may show up again in another epic battle now unfolding: getting Congress to draft and pass health-care reform.
For years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has argued strenuously against the F-22s as Cold War relics, too inefficient and expensive to warrant building any more than the 187 already in the fleet. He cut the Air Force's F-22 funding request of $400 billion, for 20 more, to zero.
He bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build more F-22s. Lockheed Martin's chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, told employees he supported Gates's call "to put the interests of the United States first -- above the interests of agencies, services and contractors." That left the powerful lobbyists to sit on their hands.
But lawmakers had all those jobs on the line in their districts, and in a lousy economy. Republicans and Democrats alike defied Gates and the White House. In June, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 13 to 11 to shift the $1.75 billion from other programs.
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the committee's ranking Republican, and Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) fought back with an amendment to the defense budget bill to strip that funding out. Then the two senators, Gates and White House officials started looking for 51 votes.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called an old Chicago pal just back from a honeymoon in Italy. He asked for a favor: Could Bill Daley quickly pull together a full house at the Economic Club of Chicago if Gates were to come and deliver a forceful speech about military readiness and how the F-22 was a bad idea?
"I said we would love to do that," said Daley, a former commerce secretary. "I got hold of the [club's] president. We sent out a blast e-mail," and about 800 members, including several executives of Boeing, headquartered in Chicago, were on hand about two weeks later, on July 16, to listen politely.
"And we got great play," said Daley, with much media coverage of Gates's remarks and his forceful comments to reporters after the speech. It was exactly what the White House wanted.
Meanwhile, President Obama vowed to veto any bill funding the F-22s. "We do not need these planes," he wrote in letters on July 13 to McCain and Levin.
When a showdown vote loomed on July 15, Senate Democratic leaders who backed Obama's effort to scuttle the program did not think they had the votes to win. There was opposition in their own caucus: Sen. Patty Murray wanted the F-22 funding (and ultimately supported it in the final Senate vote, as did her fellow Democratic senator from Washington and the two Democratic senators from California). There were only about 20 votes that could be counted on to scrap the F-22 program, and even with those undecided and leaning, "we didn't crack 50," a Senate aide said.
So they put off the vote by shifting attention to a provision in the defense bill to expand protections under laws against hate crimes. That gave the Obama administration several days to restart its lobbying effort to win the vote. That afternoon, the administration, in a statement from the Office of Budget and Management, repeated the veto threat, emphasizing the point by underlining the sentence.
"People had to ask: Did we want this to be the first time he vetoed a bill from Congress?" said one senior Democratic Senate aide.
With several days now to organize opposition to the plane's funding, Gates started calling members of Congress. Vice President Biden called his old friend, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), Inouye said. The vice president called at least two other senators and asked for their votes, and Obama called Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), said a senior administration official. National security adviser Gen. James Jones made calls, as did Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn.
On the day before the vote, Gates called Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to push him to support stripping the funding. Some of the plane's components are produced in Massachusetts, but Gates told Kerry of the importance of the vote and said the F-35 would continue to be produced, employing workers in the state. In a later call with Emanuel, Kerry said Gates had answered all his questions.
"The president pulled out all of the stops," said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who was pushing for additional funding for the plane.
Another advocate for funding the plane, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), said the lobbying effort included calling Republicans, because Obama "had a lot riding on this vote."
On Tuesday, aides in the White House's legislative affairs office, all former key aides to powerful congressmen, swarmed the Hill to collar votes. Emanuel sent some of his own staff members to help and to provide key intelligence directly to him back in the White House.
After the Senate voted 58 to 40, two votes fewer than would have been required to fund the program, Obama and the man he defeated in last year's presidential contest both hailed the outcome, using strikingly similar language.
"It really means there's a chance that we can change the way we do business here in Washington," said McCain, who long has had a deep disdain for the F-22 program.
The outcome of the fight is "a good example of us starting to change habits in Washington," Obama said.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who had worked the $1.75 billion into the $680 billion defense spending bill, was left to grumble that he had never seen a White House lobby as hard for anything as this one did.
WaPo
posted by madtom at 9:56 PM
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