Murtha Supporting Drug Habit With Pork

Make that 23 million dollars worth of redundant and unnecessary illicit drug survey information as provided by the National Drug Intelligence Center conveniently located in his district. And it isn't the first time he has done this, despite efforts by the Bush Administration to eliminate the redundant organization.

"Murtha inserted three earmarks totaling $25 million, including $23 million in funding for the National Drug Intelligence Center, a Justice Department operation in Johnstown, PA in his district."

via US News May 2005:

If President Bush has his way, the center would be one of 154 programs eliminated or cut as part of his promise to curb federal spending. But as any veteran of Washington's budget wars will tell you, closing even a single federal program can be a herculean task. Perhaps no example is more illuminating than the NDIC, which, in its 12 years, has cost taxpayers at least $350 million. The facility has run through six directors, been rocked by scandal, and been subjected to persistent criticisms that it should have never been created at all.

Pork? In the beginning, the Johnstown center did have some friends in the White House. With the blessing of President George Herbert Walker Bush, then drug czar William Bennett proposed the creation of the NDIC in 1990. Its mission: to collect and coordinate intelligence from often-feuding law enforcement agencies in order to provide a strategic look at the war on drugs. But the Drug Enforcement Administration, worried that its pre-eminent role in the drug war was slipping away, openly fought the idea. So did many on Capitol Hill, arguing that the new center would duplicate the efforts of existing intelligence centers, notably the El Paso Intelligence Center, operated by the DEA. With little support in the law enforcement community, the NDIC looked all but dead. Enter Congressman John Murtha. The Pennsylvania Democrat, who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Defense, tucked the enabling legislation for the center into a Pentagon authorization bill, with the caveat that it would be placed in his district.

The center was troubled from the start. Murtha's new drug agency was funded by the Pentagon, but the Department of Justice was authorized to run it--an arrangement bound to cause problems. "All of us wanted the NDIC," says John Carnevale, a former official with the Office of National Drug Control Policy, as the drug czar's office is known. "But none of us wanted it in Johnstown. We viewed it as a jobs program that Mr. Murtha wanted [for his district]."

Murtha bristles at implications that the Johnstown center is a boondoggle. "They say anything we do is pork barrel," he fumes. The congressman argues that the federal government should spread its facilities around the country, citing the security risk of a centralized government and cheaper operating costs elsewhere. But "obviously," he says, "I wanted it in my district. I make no apologies for that."

Headquartered in a renovated department store downtown, the center has brought nearly 400 federal jobs to Johnstown, a struggling former steel-mill town. Law enforcement agencies, ordered to send employees to the new center, had trouble finding skilled analysts or executives who would agree to live in Johnstown. Even the bosses didn't want to go. The first director, former FBI official Doug Ball, traveled back and forth from his home near Washington. His deputy, former DEA agent Jim Milford, did the same and made no bones about it. "I've never come to terms," Milford says, "with the justification for the NDIC."

Comments

[Fred Beloit]

Murtha sets an example for the country, and we should all behold him. What a terribly bad Congress person looks like.

[old trooper]

Nothing that Murtha does would surprise me!

Your Tax Dollars at Work!

[Zifnab]

Dan's bailing on the War on Drugs? But if you shut down this office, who's to say the next hallucenigen epidemic won't come in the form of a Mushroom Cloud?

Why doesn't George Bush support John Murtha in his war against terrorist drug dealers?

[Fred Beloit]

Zif, you might consider cutting back a bit on the meth. You are becoming incoherent.

[Justin Thyme]

The BS regarding the NDIC has got to stop. The treatment given the Center by Administration operatives bent on hanging Murtha has been unfair and many times downright false. New information is now available on the following Op-Ed: Critics give false impression of NDIC’s vital task (http://www.tribdem.com/editorials/local_story_166133002.html).

Stop the bashing. Get the facts.