If liberals are cut-and-run and tax-and-spend, conservatives should be cut-and-spend

from Harpers.org

Six Questions for Gordon Adams on the Real Cost of the “War on Terror”

Posted on Thursday, August 3, 2006. Gordon Adams was the senior White House budget official for national security and international affairs from 1993 to 1997. He is a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is writing a book on national security budget planning. He responded to a series of questions about the enormous sums of money being spent on the war on terror, and the Enron-style budgetary trickery being used by the Bush Administration to obscure the war's true cost. By Ken Silverstein.

Sources

1. How much money has the United States spent fighting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader war on terrorism, and how much more can we expect will be allocated over the foreseeable future?
Including all the funds Congress has voted this year, we will have spent $437 billion on Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the war on terror since 2001—about $1,500 for every American. All this despite Paul Wolfowitz's promise that the war would be over quickly, the troops home soon, and that the reconstruction would be self-funding, thanks to the sale of Iraqi oil supplies. Back in 2003 the President's economic advisor, Larry Lindsay, predicted that the Iraq adventure would cost more than $100 billion. He was fired, in part, for saying it, yet he greatly underestimated the cost. Spending on Iraq alone makes up over 70 percent of the $437 billion, with Afghanistan costing another 20 percent and the rest for counter-terror operations elsewhere in the world. Another way of looking at it is that funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror accounts for 20 percent of all the funds the Defense Department has spent over the past five years. The Congressional Research Service estimates conservatively that we might spend another $371 billion on these operations through 2016.

2. How closely do the Administration and the Congress scrutinize budget requests for all that money?
Virtually all of this money has been authorized by Congress as “emergency supplemental” funding. That is supposed to mean “we didn't expect it and we need it right away, so don't waste time with the normal budget process.” And that is how it has been done. The funding request is prepared at the top of the Defense Department, but does not go through the regular internal budget planning process; it is waved through the White House, and lands—with minimal justification—on congressional desks. Normally, the defense budget is reviewed three times—by the Budget Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Appropriations Committee. Emergency supplementals skip the first two committees and go straight to the money guys—the appropriators. Over the past five years, the appropriators have held virtually no public hearings on the Iraq money; they just mark it up and push it through for a vote. So nobody is minding the store the way they should.

3. Is there any way of knowing exactly how that money has been spent?
Not really. The Defense Department, which has received over 90 percent of the $437 billion, has stiffed Congress for two years on a requirement that Congress voted into law to demand regular reporting on how they are spending the money. So, aside from anecdotal evidence, we don't really know what happened with the money. The State Department reports every quarter on how it plans to spend the relatively small share of funds it has received for reconstruction in Iraq (about $27 billion). But it doesn't tell Congress or the public how it was actually spent, and we rely on the small office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to tell us how all that money is being spent.

4. Is the Pentagon and/or the Bush administration taking advantage of this process to fund pet projects that it might have a hard time winning support for through the normal appropriations process?
The Administration has shoved into the emergency supplemental request things they should be able to plan for on a regular basis and request through the normal budget process: repair and replacement of equipment being used in Iraq, buying new helicopters and Marine aircraft, restructuring the Army into brigades, rather than divisions, and buying new equipment for future Army needs. Some of these items have been in the works for years; all can be planned; all of them should be in the regular budget. As for the Congress, they play “three card Monte” with the emergency supplementals—they cut the regular defense budget so they can fit it into their own overall budget limits and control the deficit; then they add the money they cut back into the supplemental, which doesn't count against the limits, but adds to the deficit.

5. Have previous administrations relied on such sleight of hand to fund wars?
The Congressional Research Service looked at that question and found that in every previous war, since World War II, after one or at the most two years, the [President] planned and requested war funding from the Congress through the regular budget process. This time we are doing something new and dangerous.

6. What are the implications of all this for budget planning and public awareness of how tax dollars are being spent?
Putting 20 percent of our defense dollars beyond standard scrutiny has broken the budget planning process. The defense budget that is published is incomplete and meaningless and the emergency supplementals are based on a “trust me” system. As a result, our defense spending is dishonest and out of control. It is hard to know if we can ever fix this, but some in Congress are trying. Senators McCain, Warner, and Gregg got an amendment into the defense bill this summer that would require the Defense Department to ask that Iraq, Afghanistan, and counter-terror funds be put through the normal budget process next year. We will see if that requirement survives negotiations with the House of Representatives. It is doubtful that the Administration will comply with the requirement if it becomes law; they have not wanted to project future costs for Iraq or the war on terror at all.