Camouflaged defense spending: Stop deceptively pretending war costs separate from Pentagon's budget

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LAT: Camouflaged defense spending
The government should stop deceptively pretending that war costs are separate from the Pentagon's budget.
By Veronique de Rugy
(VERONIQUE DE RUGY is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.)
February 10, 2007

AT THE SAME TIME that President Bush requested more than $700 billion for the Pentagon budget this week, he managed to create the impression that he was asking for the much smaller amount of $481 billion. The trick he used — socking about $235 billion into two "emergency supplemental" funding requests for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — didn't fool the public for very long. But the longer the White House and Congress continue to treat "war-related" funding as a separate item from the budget for the Department of Defense, the harder it will be to control a ballooning federal budget.

Here's how the supplemental shell game works. The official defense budget for 2008 comes to $481 billion. That's a 10% increase over last year and a 62% increase over 2001. And it conveniently fails to include a supplemental request of $141.7 billion, which brings the 2008 defense total to $622.7 billion. On top of that, the president requested a 2007 supplemental in the amount of $93.4 billion, bringing this week's entire defense "budget authority request" to $716 billion (the figure of actual outlays is even higher because it includes billions already committed to the Pentagon).

Both of these supplemental items are part of the true cost of defense, and the one piece of good news is that they were mentioned in Monday's $2.9-trillion budget proposal. That's a big improvement over recent practice, in which supplementals were requested throughout the year but never mentioned in official proposed budgets. (That $93.4 billion for 2007 comes on top of a $70-billion "bridge supplemental" appropriated in November.)

However, the underlying problem — the use of supplementals to paper over the real costs of defense and domestic programs and to avoid making tough budget choices — is very much alive....

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The Democratic Congress could use Iraq spending as leverage for some long-overdue cutting of waste at the Pentagon. Or Congress may decide that more than $700 billion for defense is worth every penny. But we must stop pretending that war-related costs are somehow separate from the budget of a department whose only mission is to fight and win the nation's wars. That won't happen until Washington stops hiding major defense spending increases — years after this "emergency" practice should have stopped.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-derugy10feb10,0,5657155.story?coll=la-home-commentary