What do you give an 800 pound gorilla? Anything it wants
It was the day before the rollout of the FY 2008 budget request and all through the house the pundits were stirring, just waiting to joust on the fiscal feeding of the behemoth known as the federal government; in particular its 800 pound gorilla, the Department of Defense. Let’s see what was said
Over at CNN LATE EDITION:
BLITZER: Joining us now, the man who is putting it all together, the White House budget director, Rob Portman. He’s a former U.S. congressman, a Republican from Ohio. He’s got a tough job right now.
BLITZER: All right. Let me just get the numbers straight. In the fiscal year, 2007, the fiscal year that’s already underway, you’ve already put up $70 billion. You now want another $100 billion that would include the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to $170 billion for the current fiscal year. Is that right?
PORTMAN: Yes. That’s correct.
BLITZER: That’s correct, right?
PORTMAN: Yes.
BLITZER: How does that divide up between Iraq and Afghanistan? What percentage goes to the war in Iraq? What percentage goes to the war in Afghanistan?
PORTMAN: Most is for Iraq.
BLITZER: Ninety percent?
PORTMAN: About 90 percent. About $12 billion is for Afghanistan and then there are some other global war on terror funding priorities there, but most of it for Iraq.
BLITZER: That’s a huge number. Let me put some other numbers up on the screen to show our viewers: $170 billion for the current fiscal year. You’re also asking for $145 billion for the next fiscal year — that would be the 2008 fiscal year which starts October 1st of this year — and then another $50 billion for the 2009 fiscal year.
And you’re not asking for anything, zero, you’re projecting you won’t need any money in Iraq or Afghanistan in 2010, which seems unrealistic.
PORTMAN: Well, we’re not projecting we won’t need anything. We’re saying it’s extremely hard to predict. As you and I talked about before on the show, it’s hard to predict even for 2008. It’s tough to know what the military commanders are going to need on the ground.
And yet, for the first time, the administration is showing not only full war costs through this administration and beyond, but a lot of detail. We’re going to show it at the account-level detail. We’re going to show it with the budget for the first time. And we’re also going to do it in a way where Congress has the opportunity to have its oversight responsibilities discharged.
BLITZER: Explain the assumptions on how you got to $145 billion next year as opposed to $170 this year, and then down to “only” $50 billion — I said only in quotes — for the fiscal year 2009?
PORTMAN: The difference between this year and next year — next year being 145 — is really the fact that we have prefunded some of the important priorities, including what’s called reconstitution of equipment. In other words, when equipment is going through the wear and tear of war, replacing that equipment. So we have front-loaded some of those costs.
But our ’08 projection, frankly, is just sort of a straight-line projection. We’re assuming that the Iraq military operations will continue pretty much as they are. We, of course, hope that that’s not the case.
We hope that the president’s plan, and we believe that the president’s plan, will be successful, working with General Petraeus and others, we will begin to see some reductions in these costs.
But we’re being very prudent here. We’re giving Congress exactly what Congress asked for on a bipartisan basis, more transparency as to our costs and more information. And I’m getting a lot of appreciation across both sides of the aisle for that, Wolf.
BLITZER: They like the fact — the Democrats and Republicans — that you’re now doing this in almost a normal budget process, although I take it it’s still not part of the formal budget. You’re using the emergency supplemental formula to go through these appropriations.
PORTMAN: For the first time it will be as part of the budget, and it’s very important to note that these costs are included in our deficit calculations, so as the president has called for a balanced budget, he’s also said that we need to increase our expenditures for the military and be sure we show full war costs, so all of these costs are included in our calculations.
BLITZER: And this is a shift because the first $400 billion of so was not included in that budget calculus.
PORTMAN: It was included in the calculations, actually, Wolf, and we’ve reduced the deficit by $165 billion in the last two years despite all of these war costs. So they have been included.
Where they have not been included, as you note, is in the budget itself. And now we are doing that, and doing so, again, at the account level, so there will be a lot more detail available to Congress and to the American people.
BLITZER: And the appropriations process in Washington. That’s significant although it might go over the heads of a lot of our viewers.
Let me talk about the cost of war. You’re asking, in the new budget that you’ll submit tomorrow, basically for another $365 billion over the next few fiscal years. This comes on the $433 billion that’s already been spent, a total of nearly $800 billion.
And what a lot of people are asking, is this good money going after bad given the current situation in Iraq?
PORTMAN: Well, it’s extremely important that we support our troops, and I listened to Dianne Feinstein very carefully and Senator Lugar on this point, and what it does is it provides the appropriate resources in the budget to be sure our troops have the equipment they need, that they are taken care of well.
It’s also important to note that General Petraeus and the president have now laid out a new plan. And that plan is fully funded in these budget numbers as well, and of course, by increasing our military presence in Iraq through the so-called surge, putting additional brigades in place, we are hoping that we will begin to quell some of this sectarian violence.
BLITZER: Because $800 billion is an enormous — it’s almost a trillion dollars. And what a lot of people are saying is just imagine what the United States could do with those funds if it had been used for health care or other domestic priorities.
Meanwhile over on THIS WEEK ON ABC we saw some splitting of the Republican ranks:
STEPHANOPOULOS: And as you know, the Senate is going to vote tomorrow or later this week on a resolution disagreeing with the president’s plan to send more troops in.
McCAIN: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve called supporters of that “intellectually dishonest.”
McCAIN: I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that you disapprove of a mission and you don’t want to fund it and you don’t want it to go, but yet you don’t take the action necessary to prevent it. In other words, this is a vote of no confidence in both the mission and the troops who are going over there. I respect the views of my colleagues and my dear friend Chuck Hagel, who is coming on in a few minutes, but I do believe that if you really believe that this is doomed to failure and going to cost American lives, then you should do what’s necessary to prevent it from happening, rather than a vote of, quote, “disapproval,” which is fundamentally a vote of no confidence in the troops and their mission.
And how did Sen. Hagel take this?
HAGEL: Very simply put, we disagree with escalating our military involvement in Iraq. That is totally different, George, than saying let’s get out, let’s cut the funds. This notion that somehow we’re not supporting our troops, that’s not true. In fact, I think if you want to go to a disingenuous resolution, this idea about putting benchmarks on the Iraqis –
STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator McCain’s idea?
HAGEL: Yes, and then having no consequences, now that’s intellectually dishonest. So what are the consequences? Are we then going to pull out? If the benchmarks are not met by the Maliki government, are we then going to walk out? Are we then going to bring our troops home? Are we going to cut funding? Now, that falls more in the intellectually dishonest category.
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