Budget analyst: Recent funding approach masks true costs of war

[The Straight Story]

Budget analyst: Recent funding approach masks true costs of war
By Katherine McIntire Peters [e-mail] December 15, 2008

The Bush administration's novel approach to budgeting for and financing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has made it very difficult to discern the true costs of the conflicts, a new report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concludes.

Historically, the United States has covered the costs of war through the annual appropriations process. Supplemental appropriations were used to cover only initial, unanticipated phases of major conflicts. But the Bush administration relied exclusively on supplemental appropriations to cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2008 -- seven years after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and five years after they entered Iraq.

The reliance on supplemental funding creates a misleading picture of overall requirements, said Steven Kosiak, vice president of budget studies at CSBA and author of the report, during a briefing on Monday. "A sound budgeting process forces policymakers to recognize the true costs of their policy choices," he said.

"The failure to include estimates of the costs of these military operations in the administration's annual projections of federal spending means that those projections substantially understate likely future funding requirements," the report stated. "In turn, this may lead the administration and Congress to enact spending increases in other areas or tax cuts that it would not consider if, more realistically, its projections of federal spending requirements included an estimate of war costs."

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