Defense Secretary Robert Gates (left) may get help in cutting major weapons programs from an unexpected ally -- the tea party movement. | AP Photos | AP photo composite by POLITICO Gates may get lift from tea parties

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates takes on General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other “powerful people” in seeking cuts to major weapons programs, he may get help from an unexpected ally — the tea party movement.

Key tea party players, on and off Capitol Hill, are expressing a willingness to put the Pentagon budget on the chopping block if it will help rein in federal spending and eliminate a projected trillion-dollar-plus budget deficit.


Although generally hawkish and conservative with a libertarian streak — “we’re for strong defense” is an oft-repeated mantra in the movement — tea party leaders and allies contacted by POLITICO said that both fairness and common sense dictate that the military budget be scrutinized for such cuts, a view that puts them in sync with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and some of the most liberal members of Congress.

“Everything is on the table,” insisted Mark Meckler, a national coordinator with the group Tea Party Patriots. “I have yet to hear anyone say, ‘We can’t touch defense spending,’ or any other issue. ... Any tea partier who says something else lacks integrity.”

Tea partiers say they are concerned about “waste, fraud and abuse” within all government programs. To them, anything that government touches is riddled with inefficiency and corruption.

Yet, any tea party support for Gates’s efforts to rein in military spending may be more philosophical than tactical. Social spending, “corporate bailouts” and President Barack Obama’s health care plan are much more popular targets of tea partiers’ anger than the Pentagon.

And parochial politics — including jobs for constituents of tea party sympathizers on Capitol Hill — will come into play as well, as evidenced by the congressional battle over the second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, built jointly by GE and Rolls-Royce. Gates and Obama have threatened a veto of the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill over the second engine, but the House approved $485 million for the program anyway.

“Possibly, the tea party movement could help in that regard,” said Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), a tea party favorite, when asked about whether tea partiers would back Gates.

“Most of these people want to look at all federal spending and put it all on the table. They want to spend on strong defense, they want to support our troops, but they want to get rid of all the fluff, the fraud, the abuse, the waste in the federal government. They want to see the federal government shrink in size.”

Broun, a bitter critic of Obama — and no fan of Gates or the history of U.S. military intervention since World War II, including NATO — said the country “cannot be a protector of the whole world. We cannot do that any longer. We don’t have the money to do it anyway.”

“I think it will help Gates,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a longtime opponent of congressional pork-barrel spending. “Republicans too often over the last couple of decades have said, ‘We want to limit spending but leave defense alone.’ But I think we all recognize that if we’re in a situation like Greece, then you’re in worse shape than if you have one fewer aircraft carrier or whatever else.”

Similar language is being used by tea party candidates running for the House and Senate in Republican primaries across the country — that the Pentagon has to be included in governmentwide spending cuts.

“But in overall terms, we have to say, ‘Is all spending on the military good? Is there waste in the military? Definitely,” said Rand Paul, the tea party-favored candidate who won the GOP Senate nomination in Kentucky, in a video on his campaign website. “So there’s an enormous amount of waste out there. And we need to make sure that when we define national defense, we don’t define all military spending as being toward national defense.”

“You have to look at the entire [federal] budget, and approximately 40 percent of the budget is military,” Paul added. “So you really do have to look at the entire budget and say, ‘We are going to cut, and we are going to look at waste, fraud and abuse all across the aisle, all across every bit of the budget.’”

Paul, son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and an opponent of the Iraq war, would ban lobbying and campaign donations by any company receiving a government contract valued at $1 million or more annually, including defense firms.

His father is a member of a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers that wants to cut as much as $100 billion annually from the Pentagon budget, a rare fusion of far-left and far-right politics.

Chuck DeVore, a tea party candidate for the GOP Senate nomination in California, said cuts to defense spending are “not an issue” he has heard raised in the hundreds of movement events he has attended.

A retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, DeVore supports a robust missile defense program, wants to keep the Guantanamo Bay detention facility open and backs military tribunals for terrorism suspects.

Yet he’s opposed to “open nation building,” such as the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan. Americans “neither have enough people or treasure to be a global policeman for decades,” DeVore states on his website.

In an interview, DeVore said the U.S. must rethink its military strategy to determine from where potential strategic threats will emerge in coming years and decades. Like all tea party members, he decries the “waste, fraud and abuse” in government contracts.

DeVore, a member of the California Assembly, warned that generically opposing “waste, fraud and abuse” is not enough. “That’s just a way to not be specific” on which defense program a tea party member wants to slash or get deleted, he insisted, although he declined to offer any ideas for such cuts.

“The tea party movement, Americans that are turning out at town hall meetings, are tired of the borrowing and the spending, and they want to see us put our fiscal house in order,” said Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, chairman of the House Republican Conference and a favorite of tea partiers. “If we are going to put our fiscal house in order, everything has to be on the table. We have to be willing to look at domestic spending, we have to be able to look at entitlements, and we have to look at defense.”

Pence, however, supports the second engine for the F-35 JSF. Rolls-Royce — which has secured the first procurement contract related to the F-35 — is the second-largest employer in the Hoosier state. The company has more than 4,000 employees in the Indianapolis area alone, demonstrating once again that all politics is local, even for tea party backers.

Other tea party figures said the movement should not get bogged down in fights over which federal programs to keep or slash, including weapons programs. They prefer to stay more general in opposing government spending and deficits.

“There is tremendous diversity of opinion in the tea party movement on what I’m going to characterize as social issues or foreign policy issues,” said Sal Russo, a veteran California GOP political operative who now is a driving force behind the Tea Party Express. Tea party unity, in Russo’s view comes from three basic principles: getting the national debt under control, cutting taxes and limiting the reach of the federal government. The movement fractures when it gets beyond those basics, losing its political clout, he said.

“Once you get past that, and one of the reasons why you see a lot of balkanization in the tea party movement, is that people find other issues that they want to talk about,” Russo said. “At the Tea Party Express, we’re going to refrain from doing that.”

“When most people think of government spending, they think of the massive health care bill, and they think of the [Wall Street] bailouts. That’s kind of what drove the tea party movement,” said Ryan Hecker, one of the organizers of the Contract From America, the 2010 version of 1994’s Contract With America.

Hecker added that he was “not an expert” in defense spending and would rely on Gates or other Pentagon officials for advice on where to cut.

“It’s more difficult with the military because everyone wants a strong military,” Hecker said.