TruthNews Commentary, December 14, 2004

Clinton-era defense official Darleen Druyun recently admitted to squandering billions of taxpayer dollars in overpriced Air Force contracts in order to curry favor with Boeing. Boeing rewarded Druyun by giving her a $250,000 job as well as jobs for her daughter and son-in-law. Druyun's actions benefited to the taxpayer about as much as if the Air Force had loaded several aircraft with bales of money and dumped them out over the Atlantic.

The Druyun scandal originally came to the public's attention in November of 2003 ago when Boeing fired Druyun after finding that, while she was still an Air Force acquisition executive, she had had discussed potential employment with Boeing's chief financial officer, Michael Sears. Combined with other reports that Druyun had helped Boeing win a multibillion-dollar contract to lease Air Force tankers over French rival Airbus, it appeared that Druyun had chosen Boeing for the contract in exchange for the job.

At first the scandal seemed sort of ho-hum. True, Druyun gave the Airbus bid price to Boeing, but on the other hand, she (1) got Boeing to lower their price, (2) kept billions in taxpayer money from going to France (which is worse than throwing it in the Atlantic), and (3) made sure American boys were flying planes made in the USA rather than limp-wristed French imitations.

But of course, all of this is illegal, so Druyun's lawyers tried to plea bargain to minimize her prison term. The FBI, which didn't do much to protect us from 9/11 but has vigorously pursued insider-trading homemakers, strapped Druyun to a lie detector and found that her pulse and breathing were slightly elevated while answering certain key questions such as "Is your name Darleen Druyun?" They promptly threatened to throw her in the slammer for the next hundred years if she didn't come clean, whereupon Druyun cracked and confessed the following:

• She committed the Air Force to buy 100 tanker aircraft from Boeing at an inflated price of $20 billion as a "parting gift" before her Pentagon retirement to ingratiate herself with her future employer. Even though Boeing lowered their price, leasing the aircraft was still a far more lucrative deal for Boeing than if the Air Force bought the planes out right.

• She gave Boeing proprietary pricing information from rival Airbus on the tanker contract

• She awarded Boeing a $4 billion contract for new avionics for the C-130 cargo plane that should have gone to archrival Lockheed Martin

• She inflated the price for Boeing's contract to maintain the C-17 cargo plane

• She assassinated John F. Kennedy -- no, wait, according to Michael Moore, George W. Bush assassinated JFK

Federal prosecutor Paul McNulty, who sent Druyun up the river for 9 whole months, explained that, "Darleen Druyun owed her primary allegiance to the American taxpayer. Instead she put her own personal interests ahead of the United States Air Force." We wonder where Druyun got the idea that she could use federal tax dollars to feather her own nest. Perhaps from Congress?

When a civil servant squanders the taxpayers' hard-earned money in order to gain favors, it's considered a crime (but apparently not a very serious crime, judging by Druyun's sentence). When Congressmen squander the taxpayers' money to buy votes, not only is it not a crime, they brag about it in the newspapers. Congressmen do this by inserting "earmarks" into the budget. An earmark is money that the Congressman adds to the appropriation bill with the stipulation that it can only be spent for a specific purpose, usually within the Congressman's district. Since the President doesn't have a line item veto, he either accepts all of the earmarks, or vetoes the entire bill. In the 2004 Omnibus Appropriation Bill, the Taxpayers for Common Sense identified 7,931 earmarks at a cost of $10.7 billion. In the 2005 appropriation, the Toledo Blade identified 12,000 earmarks (that's an average of 22 per Congressman). Some of the more laughable pork in the 2005 budget includes $25,000 for the study of mariachi music, $200,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and $100,000 for a weather museum at the home of "Punxsutawney Phil," the groundhog.

Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd ranks as the Senate's longtime pork champion. Some of the projects he's gotten funded include:

• $500,000 for science and technology programs at West Liberty State College

• $1.8 million to renovate a library at Potomac State College

• $1.8 million for the National Technology Transfer Center at Wheeling Jesuit University (apparently, liberals aren't concerned about maintaining the wall between church and state when it comes to pork)

• $2 million for a science hall at West Virginia Wesleyan College

• $2.7 million for a community education center at Glenville State College

Now, many of these projects may be worthwhile things to do, but it's difficult to argue that a building a science hall at West Virginia Wesleyan College is a federal responsibility, especially when the public debt is already $7,547,176,500,405.75 (that's $7.5 trillion for those whose eyes trip over all the commas).

Darleen Druyun is only a symptom of what's wrong with Washington. If the Congress doesn't want civil servants to squander taxpayer money for their own benefit, perhaps they should stop doing it themselves.