Pentagon Arms Homeless With Ozzie-and-Harriet PJs

WASHINGTON —  They arrived still in their plastic wrappings, 25,000 pairs of pajamas from the 1950s, 100% cotton with snaps.

“These are not brand-new,” LeAnn Gregory Boyd, an official at the Central Union Mission said last month as she handed out the Defense Department surplus to the homeless and poor. “But they’re welcome.”

Every year the Pentagon gives away millions of dollars worth of surplus items--books, blankets, board games--to nonprofit groups. It’s all part of the military downsizing that began in the late 1980s. And it has unearthed some long-held stocks--like the Ozzie and Harriet-era PJs.

At Central Union Mission, the pajamas--trucked all the way from California--came along with 65,000 pairs of slipper-socks with plastic bottoms, thousands of operating-room gowns and 10,000 woolen blankets.

“Who knows what the military did with all those slipper-socks, but they had a whole heap of them,” Boyd said with a laugh. “They sure are warm.”

The Rev. Billy Fox, the new executive director of one of Washington’s largest poverty centers, said the blankets were most appreciated.

“They sure meet the need when the cold weather kicks in. I’ve been handing out blankets all day. There’s just a glow in people’s faces.”

But now, further cutbacks in military spending could jeopardize this warmhearted, post-Cold War effort for some organizations.

Boyd said the military no longer will pay to transport the donated goods beginning next year, and Congress might eliminate the initiative set up specifically to provide blankets to the homeless. Since 1987, 4 million military blankets have been donated at a cost of $30 million.

Frank Johnson, a spokesman for the Defense Personnel Support Center in Philadelphia, said the $3 million-a-year surplus blanket program barely survived in the National Defense Authorization Act of 1996. He expects it to face the budget knife in 1997, although the rest of the surplus program would continue to clean out the Pentagon’s defense closets.

“We expect that to happen this year, quite honestly,” he said.

Laurel Weir, a spokeswoman for the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, said some lawmakers believe that the blanket program doesn’t mesh with the Defense Department’s primary goal of military “readiness.”

“I don’t know what the problem is,” she said. “Obviously, it’s stuff the military’s not going to use anymore.”

In 1990, the center successfully sued the federal government to force it to distribute surplus goods to the homeless as required by the 1987 Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, named for its sponsor, the late Republican congressman from Connecticut.

Since the program began, the U.S. government has donated billions of dollars in supplies and properties to the homeless and the poor, including some military base buildings that have closed under budget cuts.

In 1992, the Pentagon advised 2,000 homeless shelters to discard 1.5 million blankets donated by the military and later found to be contaminated with the pesticide DDT. The Pentagon said it made the recommendation as a precaution even though the Environmental Protection Agency determined that the blankets posed little or no health risk.

Joe Murphy, a spokesman for the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office that supervises the distribution of military surplus, said that last year alone the government gave away $595 million worth of goods.

“We’ve even got our own World Wide Web site now so that registered nonprofit groups can get a look at what we have in our warehouses,” he said in a telephone interview from the Battle Creek, Mich., headquarters. “All our stuff isn’t perfect. . . . But there’s usable stuff there.”

Surplus items that aren’t redistributed in the military or given to nonprofit groups often end up in stores for sale to the public. “That’s why you might see a whole pallet of boots in one of those Army-surplus stores--all one size,” he said.