No Free Pass for Pentagon

Members of Congress are accustomed to battling the Pentagon to bring defense contracts to their districts and keep bases open. A more important conflict is now brewing: The Defense Department, using the cover of "too much bureaucracy," is bucking its obligation to provide full information to Congress.

Tensions between the legislative and executive branches are nothing new, but the Bush administration has been louder than most in claiming that the pendulum has swung too far toward Capitol Hill in recent decades.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has complained that bureaucracy ties up Pentagon officials, forcing them to spend too much time answering to Congress. Thus the Pentagon's proposal to do away with requirements to file hundreds of annual reports, which, the Pentagon says, usually go unread. There are equally ambitious plans to ban strikes by Defense Department civilian contract workers and scrap Civil Service protection for civilian workers at the Pentagon. Even as the Pentagon receives many billions more dollars, it doesn't want to submit all of the reports needed for congressional (read: civilian) oversight.

Times staff writer Esther Schrader reported this week that administration officials say the Pentagon is the tip of the spear in the movement to relieve executive branch agencies of oversight considered unnecessary and burdensome. But the requirements did not spring up out of thin air.