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February 17, 2005

More Budget Follies

Fred Kaplan examines the $81.9 billion supplemental defense bill the President sent to the Hill this week and notes that it strains the definition of 'supplemental' quite handily.

The rationale of supplemental bills is simple and logical. Every year we can expect government expenses to arise outside the normal budget cycle. Rather than do without (a phrase no bureaucrat dares utter), Congress passes supplemental bills to cover those requirements. Now given that we've been in Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003, I'm far from convinced that those operations merit 'supplemental' funding as opposed to routine funding in the first place. We know we're in both places and we can safely assume the missions won't end abruptly (and if they do, I'm sure we could just not spend the money without too many adverse consequences). But as Kaplan points out, there's a disturbing amount of routine funding in this bill.

It is simple enough to say, so what? The money is going to be spent whether it's part of the normal budgetary cycle or part of a supplemental appropriation. That much is true, but by placing the money in a supplemental the administration gets away with several rhetorical tricks. One I've already noted is the deficit reduction package the President advanced, that manages to accomplish the miraculous feat of cutting the deficit in half over five years only by omitting any reference to this sort of supplemental. Had this money been included in the President's original budget proposal, there either would have had to be some more serious cuts or he couldn't have made such patently ludicrous claims. We can debate the value of the first alternative, but I think we can agree on the value of the second.

Making such a large chunk of defense spending a supplemental also gives the President a large club to use on dissenting Congressmen: while John Kerry's voting for it before voting against it mantra made his pain far worse during the campaign, the fact remains that any Congressman who tries to pare fat from this bill faces the threat of not supporting the troops, a charge not far removed from treason in today's political atmosphere. Speaking as one of those troops, I appreciate support, but I don't think the DoD's budget should be immune to scrutiny just because I'm a direct beneficiary.

There's little to nothing in that supplemental that could not have been included in normal budget requests. Choosing to use a supplemental is just a cheap political tactic. Granted, politics is often about cheap political tactics, but I see no reason to reward this particular gambit. The President deserves to be called on this, and the FY2006 budget needs to be written to include as much of this as possible to forestall future 'supplemental' needs.