White House proposes cuts in nuclear dismantling program
Pentagon wants to cut $46 million from its Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
The Bush administration is proposing to trim funds for a program designed to curb the spread of nuclear and catastrophic weapons.
According to a draft of the fiscal 2006 budget proposal, the Pentagon wants to cut $46 million from its Cooperative Threat Reduction program, initiated in the early 1990s to dismantle and secure the former Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal. The total cost of the CTR program is slightly more than $400 million.
"This is classic Bush," said Charles Fant, spokesman for House Budget Committee ranking member John Spratt, D-S.C. "He touts programs like CTR in the rhetoric, then he cuts them in the budget. We've seen this kind of thing all throughout the Bush budget, in programs like veterans' health care and education."
Chris Hellman, director of the Project on Military Spending Oversight at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, lamented the proposed cut, noting that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was one of the few topics both Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., agreed on during the 2004 presidential campaign. "This sends the wrong message from a president who says countering proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a priority for his administration," said Hellman. "It may seem like a small amount of money, compared to other Pentagon programs, but when you look at the CTR program, it's a significant reduction of nearly 10 percent."
Hellman said the proposal pushes a considerable amount of funding toward homeland security programs, including chemical and biological agent detection and other programs to deal with the consequences of a WMD attack. But he criticized the administration for putting too many resources in one basket.
"Instead of getting at the root causes, they're dealing with the effect, building higher fences instead of going out and dealing with the problem of proliferation," he said. Hellman also noted that while such a small funding cut might be devastating to the CTR program, it would do little to boost other areas of the budget in need of additional funding.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment.
Congressional aides from both parties assert that the Pentagon's proposal lacks detail and that it remains to be seen whether the cut is warranted. Last year the program lost $50 million in funding because the Pentagon simply did not spend it. Critics of the program note that the schedule for a number of CTR programs is beginning to wind down, and that the United States increasingly has trouble gaining access to former Soviet Union facilities associated with the program.
Others say that despite the potential for legitimately reducing CTR funding, lawmakers are likely to be concerned with the trend line. "There are other things that we could be doing that could pay down the proliferation risk beyond the programs that the Defense Department is running currently," one congressional aide said. "There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned about these cuts."