Stupid, but at least it’s bipartisan
I am sorry to be late with this post. I just returned after being away for a funeral for a close and beloved relative; my uncle, who was a WWII veteran.
Speaking of death the Administration has just released its Fiscal Year 2009 budget request. That, of course, brings us to the Department of Defense (DOD) , or what we used to call in a more candid century, the War Department, budget.
At his news briefing yesterday at the Pentagon Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “The investment in defense spending being presented today is $515.4 billion, or about 3.4 percent of our gross domestic product.”
Hmm, “investment in defense spending.” So that’s what we’re calling it these days.
Gates noted that the budget request is a 7.5 percent increase, or $35.9 billion, over last year’s enacted level. When accounting for inflation, this translates into a real increase of about 5-1/2 percent. The request includes a $70 billion emergency bridge fund that would cover war costs into the next calendar year. A more detailed request will be submitted this spring when the department has a better picture of what level of funding will be required.
If passed by Congress, that would be the largest military budget — adjusted for inflation — since World War II. I guess that means Osama bin Laden must be the most dangerous menace since Adolph Hitler.
With Congress having already approved $691 billion in war spending since 2001, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined could rise to just under $900 billion by next spring and could near the $1 trillion mark by the end of 2009.
Well, who can argue with any of this? After all, we all want to be secure. Defense! Defense! Oh sorry, I was channeling ESPN there for a moment.
On the other hand I am a contrarian, so let me try. First, as Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information notes, “the more you look into the numbers, the more things become unclear, very unclear. Most of the numbers being released today are inaccurate or incomplete, or both.”
Wheeler is a vastly experienced analyst who is always worth listening to so let’s do exactly that. He writes:
The Department of Defense (DOD) says its budget request for the next fiscal year – 2009 – is $515.4 billion. George W. Bush’s budget as shown today by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says the Pentagon request is $518.3 billion, a $2.9 billion difference. OMB is right; the Pentagon “forgot” to include some permanent appropriations (also called “entitlements” or “mandatory” spending) for retirement and some other non-hardware spending.
The $518.3 billion is incomplete; it does not include $70 billion requested to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that number too is inaccurate. It does not include enough money to fight the wars for more than a few months in 2009. If the violence in Iraq stays at its recently reduced levels – or even declines – that $70 billion should be about doubled to get through the entire year. If things fall apart in Iraq and continue to deteriorate in Afghanistan, as is very likely, that $70 billion should be about tripled. In either case, the amount requested in the budget for the wars is off by $70 billion to $140 billion.
This barely scratches the surface of the numbers in the Pentagon’s budget that are cooked by the military services, civilian managers, and budget personnel. But, to add to the confusion and obfuscation, there are other national security costs, and uncertainties, in other agency budget requests.
The Department of Energy (DOE) has requested $17.1 billion for nuclear weapons research, storage, and related activities. Programs sure to be rejected by the Democratic Congress have been included, and Congress loves to add pork to DOE’s budget, just as it does to the Pentagon’s budget. How much? It could be as much as 10 percent, but it is not clear if Congress will add the money for its pork or force DOE to pay for it out of the programs DOE requests.
The President is requesting an additional $3.2 billion for miscellaneous defense costs in other agencies, such as the General Services Administration’s National Defense Stockpile, the Selective Service, and the FBI’s international activities. Quite minor and usually ignored, these accounts are not usually the subject of gimmicks from OMB or enough attention in Congress to mean significant changes.
If you add all the official estimates from OMB for the above, you get a total of $608.6 for 2009. That total equates to a category in the president’s budget called “National Defense.” It includes the programs that should be included, beyond just the Pentagon, to calculate what we spend for our security. But none of the numbers are right; not only are they incomplete, as indicated above, but $608.6 billion is not the number OMB shows for the combined total for these activities, $611.1 billion. The budget materials released today do not seem to explain. Your guess is as good as mine.
There is, of course, much more unaccounted military spending. If this year is like those in the past the true number will be hundreds of billions of dollars higher.
Interestingly, in the category of why am I not surprised, when it comes to the $70 billion for fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon is backing away from a commitment it made to Congress just a year ago — to estimate how much the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to cost.
Another supplemental spending proposal is expected before October, but after Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Iraq, reports to Congress on his recommendations for troop levels through the end of 2008.
We should note that the Pentagon is not supposed to be requesting a supplemental as it did in past years. It is supposed to including the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget. Last year, for the first time since the wars began, DoD budget officials detailed war spending plans for the year ahead at the same time it told Congress what its normal operating expenses would be.
With war costs running more than $12 billion a month, that $70 billion supplemental would enable the Pentagon to pay for the conflicts into the next presidential administration, but only briefly. The fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Perhaps this is George Bush’s way of saying screw it. One can easily imagine him saying, “You didn’t like the way I ran the war? Okay, here, you deal with it.”
Also no surprise, no weapons programs are canceled in the budget request. Even though, as Gordon Adams, a former OMB associate director notes, the absence of budget discipline has allowed unit costs for major new hardware programs to soar.
And, yet another non-surprise, the spending proposal will be the 11th year of continuous increases in the base military budget.
But perhaps the worst part is how little people seem to care about this. Presidential candidate of both parties seem fine with throwing money at the five sided puzzle palace. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney wants to add another 100,000 troops to the military and is demanding an additional $30 billion to $40 billion a year in defense spending. Arizona Sen. John McCain wants to nearly double the size of the marines and army, proposing that the military’s share of the GDP be increased to pay for it. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee would top them both, as he’s proposing to spend 6 percent of the GDP on defense (or more than $800 billion a year, based on today’s GDP). New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama haven’t provided defense figures, but they fully endorse the current plan to add 92,500 troops to U.S. ground forces.
So, while it may be ruinous and senseless at least it is bipartisan.
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