Washington ? Three whistleblowers Thursday charged — and top executives strongly denied — that spending by defense contractor Halliburton in Iraq was reckless and wasteful. They said the company’s KBR unit charged the government $45 for cases of soda, submitted $100 bills for laundry, put up personnel in five-star hotels and abandoned $85,000 trucks on roadsides because of flat tires.

At the end of contradictory testimony about Halliburton’s performance, the House Government Reform Committee defeated by a party-line vote a request by committee Democrats to subpoena top Bush administration officials. Democrats wanted correspondence on the decision to give a no-bid secret $2.5 billion oilfield restoration contract to Vice President Dick Cheney’s former firm.

The subpoena vote and Thursday’s testimony showed how politically polarizing an issue Halliburton — whose KBR subsidiary has the two largest contracts in Iraq — has become.

In the hearing, Democrats acted as prosecutors, praising whistleblowers and cross-examining Halliburton officials, while Republicans acted like defense attorneys and tried to discredit the whistleblowers.

Among the whistleblowers were two truck drivers who first told Knight Ridder that empty trucks hired by KBR crisscrossed Iraq at taxpayer expense.

“It seemed like there was no end in sight for the money being spent,” said truck driver James Warren of Rutherfordton, N.C., a former driver for KBR in Iraq. He was fired for reasons that he and the company dispute.

Alfred Neffgen, KBR’s chief operating officer for the Americas, called the charges “mistaken and misinformed.”

He said Halliburton had set up more than 60 camps for soldiers, restored Iraq’s oil flow to prewar levels three months early, served nearly 500,000 meals to troops daily and provided them with more than 2.3 million gallons of water.