[H.A.S.C. No. 93–71] SUBCOMMITTEE NO. 4 HEARINGS ON THE FAILURE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE TO PROPERLY IMPLEMENT DOCTORBONUS LAW HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE No. 4, Washington, D.C., Wednesday, September 25, 1974. The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable Samuel S. Stratton (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Mr. STRATTON. The subcommittee will come to order, and Secretary Brehm, would you take the witness chair, please. Mr. Secretary, have you ever testified in this room before? TESTIMONY OF HON. WILLIAM K. BREHM, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR MANPOWER AND RESERVE AFFAIRS Secretary BREHM. Yes, I have, Mr. Chairman. Not before this subcommittee, however. Mr. STRATTON. If you have testified in this room before then I take it that you have noted the inscription on the podium in front of you, which is from the Constitution. It points out that Congress shall raise and support armies and provide and maintain a navy. That inscription was placed there some years ago, Mr. Secretary, at the direction of a former chairman of this committee, Mendel Rivers, because at that time under the aegis of Mr. McNamara the Department of Defense appeared to forget the fact that the Constitution provided that Congress shall be responsible for our defense policies and our defense legislation. At that time the Department of Defense tended to regard the members of this committee as a bunch of fuddy-duddies who really weren't intelligent enough to understand some of the provisions associated with the maintenance of our defense and they didn't bother to cut us in on what was happening. Chairman Rivers recognized this very early, and took a somewhat unusual step of having those words embossed in gold and placed on the front of the podium so that Mr. McNamara or any other representative of the Department of Defense might be reminded that this committee was the one, and this Congress was the one, that was responsible for the basic organization of the Defense Department, and the basic decisions associated with it, and not some bureaucrat with the Defense Department or some smart systems analyst who might feel the members of Congress were really too stupid to understand what was going on, and that any attempt to consult with the Congress was really unnecessary. (1) We haven't had occasion to invite the attention of representatives of the Defense Department to that inscription for some years after Mr. McNamara left. Apparently Mr. McNamara began to get the message that Congress shall raise and support armies and the Secretaries of Defense who followed him seemed to understand that, but the reason that this meeting has been called this morning and the reason that I am deeply concerned, as is every other member of this subcommittee, is that something has been transpiring in the Department of Defense, and our information is that you had a lot to do with it, which indicates that that old attitude is back again in the Department. Somebody over there seems to forget that Congress is the one that is responsible for maintaining our defense establishment and for directing how it shall proceed, and somebody over in the Defense Department seems to have the idea that you can write the laws yourself and interpret them without any reference to the Congress of the United States. This is a very serious matter. It was a very serious situation with Secretary McNamara. He thought he could ignore Congress, and he succeeded in doing it for some time, but sooner or later this thing catches up with those who ignore Congress and it caught up with him. We intend this morning to try to find out what is going on in the Defense Department, who is responsible for this attempt to ignore this committee, and we are going to see that it doesn't happen again. That is why you are here, and that is why these other witnesses are here. I can't think of anything that is more serious or more grave or more likely to create a serious problem in the relationship between this body and the Department of Defense than what has proceeded in the past 6, 7, 8 months, with respect to the doctors' bonus legislation. That is why we are here today. Let me remind you, Mr. Secretary, that on November 27, 1973, Secretary Clements addressed a letter to Senator Stennis of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was a followup of some discussions on areas of critical importance to the Defense Department. The letter indicated as follows: That it was intended, and I quote, "to express the urgent priority assigned by the Department of Defense to several sections of DOD Legislative Proposal 93-3, the 'Uniformed Services Special Pay Act of 1973.' I fully recognize the heavy workload confronting both your Committee and the Congress in general, and the limited time available to address the 'Special Pay Act.' I would not trouble you at this time were it not for the high priority that I place on the three sections described below. "***Of the various officer specialties in the health field required in the Armed Forces, medical officers are the most critical. If we are to retain and attract the required numbers and quality of physicians in an all-volunteer force, additional financial incentives must be provided. "***Since the most immediate and critical problem," this is in November of '73, "is with medical officers; and since it is only the latter group where significant pay disparities exist in comparison to average civilian economic opportunities, I believe priority action at this time can be limited to the medical officer problem." On November 29, 2 days later, the Department of Defense forwarded legislation to the Armed Services Committee. In an accompanying letter, the Acting General Counsel said this. Again I quote: "Although the military departments still have approximately 13,000 physicians on active duty as a result of the doctor draft authority |