get you to agree that you will not have any problem with accountability?

Secretary RUMSFELD. Absolutely. You ought to hold us accountable for the things the decisions we make, and we have an obligation to notify you of what we are doing. You need to have good visibility into it, and I do not disagree with that at all.

Mr YOUNG. I really appreciate that.

Mr. Obey and I were very successful in moving a $40 billion supplemental following September 11, 2001. In fact, we had it out of here, through both houses on the 14th of September and we did that by working together. And we included a lot of flexibility in that and accountability. The trouble is, there are still a lot of questions we have asked about that fund that we have never gotten answers to. But I know that working directly with your Department, you have always been willing to let us know, let us do what our job is under the Constitution.

Secretary RUMSFELD. I do not think you still have questions about the defense portion of that fund, do you?

Mr. YOUNG. I am not sure.

Secretary RUMSFELD. I hope not. I know there are some questions about the nondefense portions of the fund.

END STRENGTH OF THE MILITARY SERVICES

Mr. YOUNG. Basically the nondefense portions, exactly. Because you know that we dealt with a lot of defense issues in a later supplemental which worked out okay. And the problem has never been with your Department. OMB is not always the most forthcoming with answers to questions.

Now, I want to ask a policy issue. For a number of years most of us on this Committee objected to the reduction in end strength of our military services, and I know we have all heard Congressman Hunter's speech on the number of divisions we had in the Army in Desert Storm and how many we have left today; the number of surface combatant ships; the number of Marines. We held the end strength better on the Marines than we did the other services, but the Marines being a smaller unit, I understand that almost all of the Marine Corps is in over the region right now.

Is it time to start talking about increasing end strength? Secretary RUMSFELD. I do not think so, Mr. Chairman. We still have a lot of people in uniform who are doing tasks that are not military tasks. We still have not gotten the full flexibility we believe we would benefit from by being able to go out and hire contractors to do things that are not core competencies of the Department of Defense. And third, I would say that I feel it is important that we continue to have pressure for the Department of Defense to end activities when they ought to be ended. I am putting a lot of pressure on bringing folks home from the Sinai who have been there for 22 years.

We are looking at our force deployments around the world right now. General Ralston, when he was CINC, did a good job of bringing down the NATO forces in Bosnia and Kosovo. Those numbers have been coming down. And I think that at the moment, while you are right, there is a lot going on in the world and we have had to activate a lot of Reserves. In my view, I think that the pressure

to run this place better, the Department better, and make better use of people in uniform than we have been doing in the past is a good thing, not a bad thing. And if at any point we think we need more, we will sure come up and say so.

Mr. YOUNG. I cannot disagree with that, by the way. I think you are exactly right.

Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the time, and I hope you know we are here in partnership with you to protect our American soldiers who are fighting the war, to provide them with_an_improved quality of life every chance that we get, to provide them with whatever they need to accomplish their mission and protect themselves while they are doing it. And I think you all are doing a really good job here.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Thank you very much, sir.
Mr. LEWIS. Thank you, Chairman Young.

Mr. Obey.

LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITIES REQUESTED

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Secretary, let me say certainly that there is not a Member of the Congress who is not going to vote to provide whatever money is necessary to bring this war to a completion. I think everybody understands that. In that sense this vote will be a nonevent. But I have got a problem because I have been in Congress since the same month that you left it, and so I remember things. Secretary RUMSFELD. That is a long time.

Mr. OBEY. Yes. But one of the virtues of that service is that I remember things, and some of them are even useful. And I just want to express to you my disquiet about the various authorities that the administration has asked for. If you run down the kind of authorities that you would like, in addition to putting $59 billion into a very broadly defined account, the administration requests authority to use DoD funds for undetermined military construction projects anywhere in the world. As I read that, that could have been used in the old days to fund that airstrip that was used by the Contras, for instance.

You are requesting $150 million for indigenous forces to fight the war on terrorism anywhere in the world without Congress receiving quarterly reports, or with the Congress receiving quarterly reports after the fact. In the foreign operations section, the emergency fund for complex foreign crises could go to any country, in any amount, for any purpose, notwithstanding any provision of law. At least that is what we are told.

The administration is asking for authority to borrow unlimited amounts from any account in the bill, including DoD accounts or any prior foreign operations bill, in any amounts, for reconstruction and relief of Iraq, notwithstanding any other provision of law.

And then authority is requested to transfer up to $200 million between accounts in the foreign operations section without notice as many times as the administration wishes.

And to make a long story short, the way I read that is that the administration would have, through the mixing of authorities, they would have authority and resources to put U.S. resources and U.S. troops, for that matter, into almost any country in the world, at any time, in any capacity, with the national security interests of

the United States therefore being defined almost solely by the President. That is a considerable reach.

Now you might say well, nothing that you are worried about is going to happen. But the Chairman has referred to accountability. And I recall that after September 11 when we provided three etss of funds to the administration, that we provided one $20 billion amount to the administration with the provision they could spend it any way they wanted, provided that they contacted the Committee ahead of time and consulted with us about how they intended to spend the money.

As I recall, the net consultation that we got was an e-mail after the fact telling us how they had spent the $20 billion. Now, given that track record

Secretary RUMSFELD. I do not think that is true of the Defense Department portion.

Mr. OBEY. Well, most of it was not in defense.
Secretary RUMSFELD. I understand.

Mr. OBEY. Whether it is defense, whether it is TSA, or whether it is State, or you name it, when Congress says spend $20 billion and but talk to us ahead of time, and then we are told afterwards, oh, by the way, boys and girls, here is what we did, you can understand why we are not interesting in playing kissy-face with these authorities.

Every Member wants to provide you certainly we are willing to look at providing some additional flexibility if that is needed. But flexibility is one thing, and being able to turn the Constitution into a pretzel is another thing. And frankly I have not yet ever met a President of either party who thought that Article I of the Constitution was a mistake.

Secretary_RUMSFELD. Mr. Congressman, let me make a couple of comments. First, I agree with Chairman Young that the Congress has that obligation, and that to the extent that any flexibility is provided, the individuals given flexibility need to be held accountable and they need to report to the Congress and they need to notify the Congress, and the Congress needs to understand the logic of what they are doing in close proximity to the time it is done.

Now, in this case, some 50 percent, close to 50 percent of the requests for the Department of Defense, is either already spent or committed. That seems to me to reduce the concern that one ought to have.

Let me give you an example of a situation, and I do not want to pick on any one country, but it is an interesting example. We had the 4th Infantry Division in the Mediterranean, hoping to bring it in through Turkey and put it in the North. And it would have come in by boat and rail across Turkey into northern Iraq. We waited and we waited and we waited. It did not happen. It was not approved by the Turkish Parliament, ultimately.

There is an airfield in northern Iraq, I think it is called Bashir. And you mentioned military construction. So at the last minute what are we doing, we are flying aircraft in there, and engineers and construction people, trying to fix that airport so that we can bring, like we just did from the north, we brought in the 173rd, and they came in yesterday and they will be coming in over a period of time. There was not time to come and go through a process

of weeks or months to be able to get the military construction approval to fix that airport, so that in fact we would have the kind of forces in the north that will be of concern to Saddam Hussein and his crowd, that will be there to see that what takes place there does not in any way run the risk of having that country fracture, and it is an important thing that had to be done and it had to be done in real time.

It is one thing that seems to me to say to somebody, look, you are starting here and you are going to go there, but we are not going to tell you how to turn every corner and when to slow down and whether or not there will be an accident at the next corner and whether the weather will be bad. Those things are not knowable. So I think a degree of flexibility is realistic and understandable, notwithstanding the importance of Article I of the Constitution.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Secretary, I think what has just happened here is, I have given a good illustration of how it should not happen, and you have given a good illustration of how perhaps you might need to have something happen. There ought to be some territory in between that we can both agree on so we do not wind up running into either your problems or ours. I would suggest, for instance, that moving from $2 billion to $9 billion in one account, that could build a lot of airfields.

Secretary RUMSFELD. I kind of like Chairman Young's idea of accountability.

Mr. OBEY. So do we. I wish we had seen it last time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. LEWIS. Thank you very much, Mr. Obey. Mr. Hobson.

GUARD AND RESERVE FORCE STRUCTURE

Mr. HOBSON. Gentlemen, you are doing a great job. We always have our things that we have to look at. I am concerned, and I will talk to Dov about it later, about some money that was spent over the last year that I used to be chairman of Military Construction and I never heard about it until it was done. But I do not want to talk about that today.

On forces, I do think, sir, that you need-it would be prudent, and you may be already doing this, to look at the kind of MOSS and AFSCs that you have in the Guard and Reserve, as there may be some balance that needs to be shifted around when a large part of the military police were put into those some years ago, and now those people are being called-up and recalled, and we just need to look at that to make sure you have the right career fields in the right places.

Secretary RUMSFELD. You are exactly right. We have got to fix it. Those Guard and Reserve who are in skills that do not exist on active duty get called up over and over and over again and for longer and longer periods, and we have got to fix it. We have got to see that we have got on active duty all the skills we are likely to be needing, and that we use the Guard and Reserve as the total force concept as support in peak periods rather than on a relatively steady basis.

BUY AMERICA LEGISLATION

Mr. HOBSON. The other thing I would like to talk about a little bit is some of us have a concern the Defense Department is currently buying-I do not want to name countries here but brakes from a company that I have asked about that is going on our airplanes, and they do not buy any airplanes from us. There is a sealant going on the building that you all occupy that is not being made in this country, when there is a competitive, cheaper product being made in this country.

And I am concerned that we do not use taxpayers' dollars to reward, either here or in Iraq, those people who have made this job much more difficult to do and probably more expensive to do than it needed to be. And I hope you all would, Mr. Secretary, take a look at those things and try to do what you can. I know someone will come from the State Department, but I think from this Member's standpoint, I think it is terrible to take taxpayers' dollars for those types of things.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Well, I do not know quite what I would say. There are so many ways that things get acquired through defense funds. In some cases you delegate the responsibility to a contractor, and he has subcontractors, and they make judgments that occur down the line. And I do not know of any way that, for example, every aspect of every contract could be looked at to see those kinds of things, other than by the contractors.

Mr. HOBSON. Then you will see some of us putting more "Buy American" language into the bill, which I do not like to do because it does tie your hands. But if these things are not being looked at to where we have cheaper products here that can be used as the same product, then we are going to have to take oversight into our hands, and we will tie it up and say you have to come back for approval. And I do not want to do that. And I do not want to argue with you about it now but it is something that affects the people that I represent, and I do not like to see it happen.

Secretary RUMSFELD. Dov seems to know something about this. Mr. ZAKHEIM. Yes, I am familiar with the country you are referring to, and here is the problem-without getting into that specific country. It is one thing to say there may be a cheaper alternative in the United States, and those are things we do look out for all the time. When you are dealing with some of the countries that have been more than a little awkward over the past few weeks and quite troublesome, one has to look at the entire context. And that particular country, for instance, has been exceedingly helpful in Afghanistan. And so we have to balance to some extent what people do for us in one context as opposed to what they might not be doing for us with another, and we do not want to throw the baby out with the bath water.

So I would similarly urge some caution, which is a very different issue from where we know that we may have something cheaper at home, in which case we really need to be looking into it, as the Secretary said.

Mr. LEWIS. Thank you, Mr. Hobson.
Mr. Dicks.