Democrats are demanding more information about military contracting, and threatening to cut back on the practice if the Pentagon cannot satisfactorily account for the spending.

The Pentagon’s contracting practices were a focus of a March 29 hearing on the fiscal 2008 defense budget held by the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ investigative arm, has warned for years that the Defense Department poorly accounts for its contracting, even as the amount of money the department spends on contractors has increased, largely because of the Iraq War.

With control of Congress in the hands of Democrats who are already angry about the conduct of the war, military contracting is under increasing scrutiny.

“It’s going to be a major issue,” John P. Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said in an interview. “If we cannot get a reasonable accounting of the contractors, we will sure as hell cut them back.”

Defense Department contracts grew from $133 billion in fiscal 2000 to $258 billion in fiscal 2005, according to the GAO. Spending on contracts totaled $295 billion in fiscal 2006, Pentagon comptroller Tina Jonas told Murtha’s subcommittee.

The figures include funding for services and weapons production.

Even Pentagon officials have trouble explaining where all that money goes. At the March 29 subcommittee hearing, David Obey, D-Wis., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, noted that the Pentagon’s $481.4 billion budget request for fiscal 2008 included $112 billion for contracts that administration documents simply described as “other,” with no further explanation.

Obey said that “$112 billion is a pretty big ‘other,’ ” and asked Jonas for an example of what “other” might include. Jonas declined to offer even a single example, telling Obey she would follow up on the question.

The Iraq War has driven much of the growth in Pentagon contracting, according to the GAO. It is unknown how many contractors the Defense Department has in Iraq; no one in the military keeps track of them, GAO says. The Army alone estimates that it employs 60,000 contractors in Iraq. By comparison, just 9,200 contractors supported the military during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the GAO reported in December.

Members of Murtha’s subcommittee said about 126,000 contractors work for the military in Iraq, a figure that was not contested by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who also testified at the March 29 hearing.

There are a multitude of jobs that contractors fill in Iraq. Among them, contractors feed troops; maintain mine-clearing equipment, drones and the Army’s new Stryker armored vehicles; provide security to senior military and government officials, and serve as translators.

But in some cases, it is not clear what contractors do. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, who sits on Murtha’s subcommittee, said that despite repeated inquiries to the Pentagon, she has never learned what four military contractors were doing in Fallujah, Iraq, before their infamous killing in March 2004, when insurgents gibbeted their bodies from a bridge in the town.

“I am a member who does not support the privatization of our military,” Kaptur said in an interview. “It is in America’s national interest to have people in the military pledged to the time-tested values of duty, honor and country — not bounty and mercenary.”

A Pentagon spokesman did not return a phone message requesting comment. Gates told Murtha’s committee that the Pentagon’s contracting practices are “a matter of concern” and that the issue is one reason he supports the continued appointment of a special inspector general for military operations in Iraq.

Some of the military’s contracting is appropriate, says David M. Walker, the comptroller general and director of the GAO.

“Contractors have an important role to play in the discharge of the government’s responsibility, and in some cases the use of contractors can result in improved economy, efficiency and effectiveness,” he said in testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Feb. 15.

The problem is that those benefits are not always the military’s reasons for hiring contractors.

“There may be occasions when contractors are used to provide certain services because the government lacks another viable and timely option,” he said. The GAO has considered Pentagon contracting a “high-risk” issue since 1992.

Murtha sent a warning to the Pentagon in the fiscal 2007 supplemental war spending bill (HR 1591) the House passed on March 23. A provision of the bill would cut 10 percent of the $52.5 billion that the legislation provides for military “operations and maintenance” unless Gates submits a report detailing the use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

House Democrats charged in the report accompanying the bill (H Rept 110-60) that “the increasing reliance on private contractors to supply basic security and logistics services” has helped increase costs of the war “well beyond those initially contemplated.”

“We are unhappy,” Murtha said, “because in my estimation, they have been able to sweep this stuff under the table all this time.”