WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is proposing to exempt the Pentagon's controversial missile defense system from operational testing legally required of every new weapons system in order to deploy it by 2004.
Buried in President Bush's 2004 budget, in dry, bureaucratic language, is a request to rewrite a law designed to prevent the production and fielding of weapons systems that don't work.
If the provision is enacted, it would be the first time a major weapons system was formally exempted from the testing requirement.
The proposal follows administration moves to bypass congressional reporting and oversight requirements in order to accelerate development of a national missile defense system.
One of Bush's goals when he took office was to carry out a missile defense system -- an idea first proposed by President Reagan -- and he almost immediately expanded the scope and the funding of the controversial program, which had encountered scientific and budgetary difficulties in recent years.
Last year, to help achieve that goal, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave the Missile Defense Agency unprecedented managerial autonomy and removed procurement procedures that were intended to ensure new weapons programs remain on track and within budget.
Administration officials believe the unusual measures are necessary because of a growing missile threat from rogue countries such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
But critics maintain the new independence and secrecy of what has become a vastly expanded missile defense program increases the chance that the Pentagon will spend tens of billions of dollars on an antimissile system that doesn't work.
Much is at stake. While the exemptions granted previously gave the missile defense program an unprecedented degree of autonomy from congressional oversight, they did not exclude it from testing.
Highlighting its technical weaknesses has been opponents' best hope for slowing the long-debated program.
In recent years, critics repeatedly have used Pentagon data from missile defense flight tests to challenge whether the experiments were as successful as claimed.
The latest proposal from the Pentagon would exempt the missile defense deployment from a law that requires the Defense Department to certify that appropriate operational testing has been completed before putting systems into production.
