Officials move toward year-long requests for extra war funding

The Bush administration, in an apparent about-face, plans to submit a full-year funding request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan along with its fiscal 2008 budget to Congress next month, ending the increasingly unpopular practice of seeking two large emergency supplemental appropriations each year.

Senior Pentagon officials told the House Budget Committee Thursday they will use fiscal 2007 war costs -- which some budget watchers say could top $170 billion -- as the basis for the single supplemental funding request they will make for fiscal 2008.

By planning for wartime operations a year in advance, Pentagon officials are complying with a provision in the fiscal 2007 defense authorization bill requiring the Defense Department to request all predictable war costs on a yearly basis at the same time as it submits its annual budgets.

President Bush opposed the language last year, issuing a presidential signing statement questioning whether he is legally bound to abide by it.

Though the administration now has decided to comply with the language, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England argued Thursday that projecting war costs on an annual basis would increase chances that the estimate would be off target due to the ever changing situation on the ground in Iraq.

If the Pentagon underestimates the actual costs, the department will have to ask for another -- albeit, a smaller -- supplemental to cover these unforeseen costs.

England warned, too, that Congress was making a "tradeoff" by demanding estimated costs of war-related operations and the necessary documentation and other justifications upfront once a year, instead of receiving more precise requests and budget data every six months or so.

Senior lawmakers from both parties have become increasingly frustrated with the supplemental spending requests, saying there is little time to consider them before the money must be appropriated, allowing for an end-run around the traditional oversight channels. This has led to a bipartisan call for the administration to put war-related funding requests into the regular defense budget and drop its reliance on supplemental funding.

During consideration of the fiscal 2005 and fiscal 2006 Defense spending bills, the then-Republican-led Congress actually encouraged reliance on supplementals by including so-called emergency "bridge" funds of up to $50 billion to cover the costs of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider war on terrorism.

Last year, the administration took a cue from Congress by folding a $50 billion supplemental request into its proposed fiscal 2007 defense budget -- an amount subsequently increased to $70 billion by lawmakers.

With the planned increase of 21,500 troops into Baghdad and Anbar province, a second supplemental request for the remainder of fiscal 2007 could easily surpass $100 billion. It is expected to be submitted with the fiscal 2008 budget and the full-year fiscal 2008 supplemental next month.

Paying for military operations out of two separate bills each year has provided a "misleading and overly optimistic picture" of annual war costs, Steve Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told the Budget Committee.

At Thursday's hearing, lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for leveraging emergency supplementals to pay for future programs, citing news accounts that Defense officials want to use war funds to buy two Joint Strike Fighters, which will not be ready to fly combat missions for several more years.

"It's amazing what gets added into these bills," said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.

England, who would not discuss the specifics of next year's budget or supplemental requests, said the department uses money it receives to recover costs on equipment destroyed in combat to pay for the next generation of weapons systems.

That money for future systems "may be well spent," observed Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., "but not through the supplemental."