Power Game (53 page)

In none of these cases were the senators or congressmen unwitting dupes. They wanted to move in the direction the staff was pushing. But sometimes staffers steal the ball on policy, and members complain of being at the mercy of staffs, often forced to fight fires started by overly aggressive staff aides.

“There are many senators who feel that all they were doing is running around and responding to the staff: my staff fighting your staff, your staff competing with mine,” Senator Fritz Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, bleated in protest.
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“It is sad. I heard a senator the other day tell me another senator hadn’t been in his office for three
years; it is just staff. Everybody is working for the staff, staff, staff, driving you nutty, in fact. It has gotten to the point where the senators never actually sit down and exchange ideas and learn from the experience of others and listen. Now it is how many nutty whiz kids you get on the staff, to get you magazine articles and get you headlines and get all of these other things done.”

Bird-dogging the Executive Branch

Yet whatever the complaints, no one in Congress is prepared to give up any staff. All too clearly, members of Congress understand that staff is essential for competing with each other and especially for confronting the executive branch. Normally, when this confrontation occurs, staff and members work hand in hand with the congressional member leading the way—but not always. Some exceptional staffers are outchallenging the executive branch, bird-dogging it more aggressively than members. In other cases, congressional staff agencies operate almost as a third force, as referees between Congress and the White House.

For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), set up in 1974, technically has no power; it passes no legislation. Unlike committee staffs, it cannot actually supervise the promoting, revising, or funding of programs. Its power derives purely from the intangible elements of information and credibility. Yet the CBO represents the most important institutional shift of power on domestic issues between the executive branch and Congress in several decades.

Before the CBO was created, the president’s budget was, as scholar Hugh Heclo put it, “the only game in town for taking a comprehensive look” at government. The presidency, through the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), had a monopoly on the government’s economic forecasting. Congress, like the president, used CEA and OMB forecasts of economic growth, inflation, and budget deficits.

Now, CBO gives Congress an independent perspective on those crucial matters, setting the framework of policy debate. CBO’s deficit forecasts can differ from the administration’s by $30 billion to $40 billion and that influence has a major impact on a whole session of Congress, because Congress is forced to cut more or mat cut less than the president proposed. In the Reagan years, CBO’s capabilities enabled Congress largely to ignore Reagan budgets after 1981 and to develop its own budgets—something inconceivable without CBO.

By December 1985, when Congress passed the six-year deficit-reduction
plan (the Gramm-Rudman bill) CBO was put on the political hot seat. To protect itself from politically tilted administration estimates, Congress gave CBO joint responsibility with the administration’s OMB to set deficit estimates that would trigger automatic cutting of government programs, if the deficit targets were not met. Having that much political responsibility troubled Rudolph Penner, a Republican economist who was then head of CBO.

“It’s hard to think of other instances where unelected officials have such power to do good or evil,” said Penner, a bland, balding technocrat. He warned Congress that “substantial errors are possible” in economic forecasting and alerted it to the “disadvantages of conveying so much power to mere technicians.”
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But Congress had more faith in CBO than in OMB and put Penner in the middle.

In early 1986, Rudy Penner got caught in political crossfire. Pete Domenici, the Budget Committee chairman, was angry at Penner for making relatively optimistic forecasts on the economy and the deficit. House Democrats were happy with Penner’s optimism because that meant less pressure to cut programs. Domenici likes to use gloomy forecasts to impose discipline on Congress to cut programs, and he felt Penner’s estimates were undermining his strategy. As it turned out, the economy worsened, and the deficit estimates rose naturally, pleasing Domenici without forcing Penner to give in.

Penner had even sharper clashes with the Reagan administration on defense spending in the 1987 budget. Penner said the administration had understated the Pentagon’s actual spending by $14.7 billion. (Administration figures, I was reliably told, were dictated by Weinberger rather than being economically calculated by Budget Director Miller.) Realizing that Penner’s numbers would incite Congress to cut more from defense, the administration attacked Penner, and so did Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the hawkish chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. At a hearing in July, Stevens raged at Penner, threatening to cut CBO’s own budget if Penner did not change his estimate on the Pentagon. “That really rocks this defense bill,” Stevens bellowed at Penner. “I am going to cut your money. You cannot put me in this position.”
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But Penner stood his ground. Later, the administration had to change its numbers, tacitly acknowledging that CBO had been right.

The CBO is a special example of congressional staff power. Its estimates are required by law, and that forces its opinions into full view. CBO cannot escape a high profile. But normally, success in the staff power game against the executive branch dictates a low profile. If
information is power, anonymity is protection. The basic technique for staffers is to develop substantive mastery, to work contracts inside the administration, to feed critical information to key legislators, and then let them take the heat and get the publicity for battling the White House or the Pentagon. Only a few staffers voluntarily go against the grain and play risky, high-visibility tactics.

One of the most powerful in recent years is a blunt-talking weapons expert named Tony Battista, who struck me initially as a white-collar Fonzie (the TV sitcom character), with his jaunty, high-wave hairstyle and the accent of a Staten Island tough. A youthful-looking fifty, Battista looks as if he belongs in a garage, with his head popping out from under a car hood or wiping grease off his hands. That is where he would usually rather be, for Battista is an antique car buff who spends his weekends restoring such prestige models as a Bentley, a Lotus, and several, old Cadillacs, when he is not working overtime for the Research and Development (R and D) Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. His engineering skills are definitely hands on. One of his frequent reactions to outrageous military parts prices is to tell the Pentagon, “I could make it for a fraction of that in my own garage.” More than once, he has actually done so. Battista was trained as an engineer, worked a couple of years for the space agency and nine more at the Naval Surface Weapons Center before becoming a congressional staffer in 1974.

Battista may be unknown to the public, but he is respected and feared by Pentagon officials and defense contractors. “Tony’s got a lot of power and he uses it,” said Dave McCurdy, a rising Democratic star on defense issues.
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Defense lobbyists say he is as powerful as a subcommittee chairman because his technical expertise, hard work, and tenacity carry the day nine times out of ten with committee members. “If Tony wants a certain program to succeed in his committee, chances are it will, and if he wants it not to succeed, chances are it won’t,” one defense lobbyist told me. Another bluntly told Richard Halloran of
The New York Times:
“If he’s against you, you’re in trouble. He’ll fight a bear with a buggy whip.”
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Having Battista on your side, added Tom Downey, a liberal New York Democrat, “is like the old days when you got into a fight—you took the toughest guy in town with you.”

Knowing Battista’s clout but attacking his effort to cut spending on Star Wars space defense in 1985, a
Wall Street Journal
editorial blasted Battista as “an antidefense staffer” with “a line-item veto.” (Pentagon budgets, like all others, come with each program or weapons procurement item as an entry on a single line, hence the term
line item
. The
Pentagon’s research and development budget is broken down into some eight hundred line items, embracing 3,400 projects. A real “line-item veto” would give Battista the ability to kill some of those individual items. It is a significant power, one that Congress has refused to give to Reagan. The
Journal
meant that Battista had that kind of power in practice, not in law.)

To call Battista antidefense is inaccurate. Congressional hawks on defense such as Samuel Stratton, a New York Democrat, or Bob Dornan, a hard right California Republican, praise Battista’s commitment to defense. Battista has backed the MX missile and favored research on space-based defenses, though he is sharply critical of portions of Reagan’s program, which he insists were junked as unworkable or ridiculously expensive before Reagan enshrined SDI in 1983. During the Carter years, Battista quietly helped save research-and-development funding for the B-1 bomber. “Members trust him, both sides of the aisle,” Dornan told me. “When he sinks his teeth into something, you know you’re going to get a fair bipartisan assessment. He’s got an excellent scientific grasp of all the R and D stuff. Tony alone, I believe, prevented the junking of the B-1 R and D program. I think SAC ought to name one plane
The Battista
.”
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Significantly, one defense contractor whose firm has large business with all three military services told me: “Battista’s not in anyone’s pocket. If you disagree with him, you’d better reexamine your position, because he’s very smart and he does not take his position without good reasons.”

In person, Battista is friendly, outgoing, almost casual, not pugnacious—but sure of himself in all things technical. He is good at reading the mood of Congress, and for a Congress that has grown skeptical of Pentagon procurement practices, he is ideal. He believes in both strong defense and efficient spending of tax dollars. At hearings, he grills generals mercilessly, more like a senior member of Congress than a staff aide. He will challenge an administration weapons system and get his subcommittee chairman to invite a bevy of top Pentagon brass to come debate him. In one hearing during the Carter years, Battista went toe-to-toe with Deputy Defense Secretary Graham Claytor, Defense Undersecretary William Perry, General P. X. Kelley, then chief of the Readiness Command, and two other generals, and he carried the day. The subcommittee bought his recommendation to kill funding for research on a new cargo plane. In the Reagan years, he challenged Donald Hicks, once Pentagon research-and-development chief, on three issues: the Star Wars space defense program, a new single-warhead mobile missile, and research into hardening concrete silos around
American ICBMs. Hicks went away bristling; Battista was unperturbed, and the committee took his advice on all three issues. Later, with committee support, Battista forced the Navy to drop a duplicate radio communications system and use a similar system being developed by the Air Force, a move that saved taxpayers several hundred million dollars.

“I’ll debate anybody at the witness table,” Battista told me. “I could be wrong. I have been wrong because I didn’t have all the data and the facts on a few occasions. If I’d never been wrong, I haven’t been doing my job. I’m not so pompous and cavalier to sit there and say I’ve never been wrong.”

What grates the Pentagon, some contractors, and quite a few House members is that Battista presses his favorites quite openly, such as fiber-optics guided missiles and other high technology. He is a tireless foe of duplication and wasteful rivalry among the services. He insists that new weapons be run through combat-realistic tests. Experience makes him especially valuable to Congress. He has been around long enough to know which contractors are good during the research phase but inefficient on production. He has a keen sense of smell when things are going wrong. He is a bird dog. With the help of longtime contacts inside the Pentagon, he sniffs out weapons systems headed for trouble and huge cost overruns. And he barks very publicly.

Another thing that makes Battista so effective is thorough homework: ferreting out phony Pentagon reports and faulty weapons. Several years ago, for example, the Air Force had contracted with Hughes Aircraft for an air-to-surface missile called the Maverick. It was supposed to be a long-range tank killer using an infrared heat seeker to find the tanks. When an Air Force colonel told Battista that it could lock onto tanks at nearly thirteen miles (65,000 feet slant range, in technical jargon), Battista became suspicious. When the colonel threw technical jargon at Battista, he threw it right back. Their conversation, he recalled, went this way.

“ ‘Hold on, hold on,’ I said. ‘What’s the minimum resolution of that seeker?’ And he told me. And I said, ‘What’s the minimum resolvable temperature?’ And I went through a list of parameters with him and I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. I don’t have a computer here, but I just did a rough calculation in my head and, Colonel, that’s pure bullshit.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I’ve got it here on tape.’ And I said, ‘I don’t care what you’ve got on that tape.’ So he proceeded to show me this tape, and I said I didn’t believe it. So the Air Force said, ‘What will it take to make you a believer?’ And I said, ‘Let’s go fly.’

“I hate to fly,” Battista confessed to me. “I’m a white-knuckle flyer. So they stuck me in the back seat of an F-4 with a [Maverick] seeker on it. We went out looking for tanks. Only I did something that I didn’t give them any advance warning of. I set up a bunch of little charcoal fires out there to simulate thermal clutter.”
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Translated, that means that Battista took steps to make sure that the Maverick test was realistic. A normal battlefield has many things that generate heat, in addition to tanks; that is known as thermal clutter. Battista figured—quite correctly—that the Air Force had a clear, sandy test range with only one or two tanks, easy conditions for the Maverick heat seeker to find its target—no clutter. So Battista had a colleague, Tom Hahn, set charcoal fires out around the test range to simulate the normal thermal clutter of a battlefield.