End the abuse of supplemental budgets for war

War funding included in Obama's overall budget

Updated: Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | By Angie Drobnic Holan

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama often spoke against the Iraq war. Among the many things he didn't like about it was the way it was funded. Obama said he would end the Bush administration's practice of putting war costs in supplemental budgets and instead count spending for the Iraq war in the overall budget. He argued that it would receive greater congressional oversight and be a more honest way of addressing its impact on the deficit.

"For too long, our budget process in Washington has been an exercise in deception; a series of accounting tricks to hide the expense of our spending and the shortfalls in our revenue and hope that the American people won't notice," Obama said at a meeting on fiscal responsibility on Feb. 23, 2009. "Budgeting certain expenditures for just one year, when we know we'll incur them every year for five or 10; budgeting $0 for the Iraq war — $0 — for future years, even when we knew the war would continue; budgeting no money for natural disasters, as if we would ever go 12 months without a single flood, fire, hurricane or earthquake."

President Obama presented his first budget outline on Feb. 26, 2009. Included in fiscal year 2010 are ongoing expenses for the war in Iraq.

In a briefing that day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he could not put an exact number on how much money had been moved to the regular budget that would likely have been in a supplemental during the Bush administration. But he did list three programs that would have been moved to the regular budget — the costs of adding personnel to the Army and the Marine Corps; new programs for wounded veterans and their families; and an initiative called the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), a program that finds ways to counter roadside bombs that have caused many casualities in Iraq.

We asked Michael O'Hanlon, a defense expert with the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, for his thoughts on Obama's budget outline. O'Hanlon acknowledged Obama's progress on this promise but questioned whether supplemental budgets for wars are really that bad.

"In broad terms, this is not nearly as consequential a decision as some people want to argue," O'Hanlon said. "With supplementals, we debate the costs separately rather than hiding them in the larger defense budget."

Supplementals also help make sure that defense budgets don't grow during a time of war and then stay at the larger number permanently. "If and when these wars ever end, you want to return to the base" number for the budget, he said.

We should also note that Obama will have to submit at least one supplemental war funding to Congress, because the Bush administration's last budget doesn't end until Sept. 30, 2009. The 2010 budget, which is the one Obama is working on as of this writing, goes into effect Oct. 1, 2009. We're not counting the 2009 supplemental request, which the Obama administration said would come to about $75 billion, because it's necessitated by the final Bush budget, which Obama had no control over.

Given that this is just a budget outline and we need to see whether Congress goes along with his request for a combined budget, we're rating this In the Works.

Sources:

Office of Budget and Management, Budget Documents for Fiscal Year 2010 , accessed Feb. 26, 2009

U.S. Department of Defense, DoD News Briefing with Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen , Feb. 26 2009

Interview with Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution