WASHINGTON – Congress is on the verge of killing a much-derided program in which the Pentagon spends millions of dollars a year buying coal from Pennsylvania to heat military bases in Germany.

A routine provision that requires coal purchases for U.S. Air Force and Army bases in Germany was left out of the omnibus spending bill expected to be approved Friday, according to a government watchdog group and House members who’ve pushed to kill the program.

“The House and Senate showed some sense and are letting this decades-old relic die an ignoble death,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which gave budget-writers a “Golden Fleece” award for initially proposing to fund the program this summer.

The coal purchases were defended by Rep. Lou Barletta, R- Harrisburg. He and the rest of the state’s House delegation voted unsuccessfully to protect them earlier this year.

“Anthracite coal is a part of the economic history of Pennsylvania, helped fuel the industrial revolution that built America into a world power, and continues to employ thousands of our residents to this day,” Barletta said in a statement to CNHI newspapers.  “I am very disappointed in what happened to this program, and have been working with my colleagues toward the restoration of it.”

Lawmakers were mislead about the program’s impact by figures provided by the taxpayer group, said Michael Clark, the former head of the Anthracite Industry Association who now represents a German utility that works with the Defense Department.

An Air Force contract with his utility to provide a variety of services came to about $17 million last year, Clark said. Only $1.6 million of that is to buy coal from mines including the Reading Anthracite Co. in Pottsville, Lehigh Anthracite in Tamaqua, and the Blaschak Coal Corp. in Mahanoy.

The cost of getting coal elsewhere is more expensive, Clark said. If purchasing coal from Russia, the bases would be vulnerable to having their energy cut off.

But the Pennsylvania coal connection created more than 40 years ago has long come under fire by the taxpayers’ group as wasteful pork.

According to the group, five Pennsylvania congressmen in 1961 convinced the Pentagon to buy coal from their state and ship it to boilers at U.S. bases in Germany, helping to prop up Pennsylvania’s struggling coal industry. They were Sens. Joseph Clark, a Democrat, and Hugh Scott, a Republican, as well as Republican Reps. Ivor Fenton and William Scranton, and Democrat Rep. Daniel Flood.

In 1972, the Pentagon planned to save money by shifting to oil heat, but Flood, the second-ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee at the time, inserted language into the budget blocking the conversion.

At the program’s peak, the Defense Department paid $20 million a year on 500,000 tons of anthracite coal, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. Though the program is much smaller now, the military bought 9,000 tons of coal last year to ship 4,000 miles to Kaiserlautern, Germany.

In June, the House passed a budget amendment stopping the coal purchases.

The entire Pennsylvania delegation voted to save the program, but it was doomed by a 252-179 vote. Though there was no Senate version of the bill, the program was not included in the omnibus budget proposal.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican who cosponsored the measure killing off the plan, said the past six presidents have tried to end the purchases.

In an interview, McClintock said, “If there is a poster child for government waste, here it is At a time when we hear the military is being cut to the bone, to include an earmark this  expensive is ridiculous.”


Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C., reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at kmurakami@cnhi.com