Congress backs funds to keep Guard troops on border

Appropriators have allocated $247 million in the fiscal 2008 Defense spending bill to continue a National Guard mission along the southwest border that had been neglected in the Bush administration's budget request.

The funding package approved Tuesday by House and Senate appropriations conferees would keep about 3,000 National Guard troops deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border until the spring to assist in border-security operations and training of border patrol personnel.

Neither the Defense Department nor the Homeland Security Department requested money to continue the mission, dubbed Operation Jump Start, in fiscal 2008, despite long-standing administration plans to keep a limited number of troops on the border into this fiscal year.

But the money approved by appropriators this week still is $89 million below what Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the Pentagon's National Guard Bureau, has said he needs to keep the operation running until July, as planned.

Congressional and National Guard sources said Wednesday that any additional money needed for Operation Jump Start could be reprogrammed from other accounts in the Defense Department's nearly $460 billion budget.

Congress also could add the money for the mission to the wartime supplemental spending bill that Democratic leaders say they will consider early next year.

A National Guard source added that there is "zero slack" in the Guard's fiscal 2008 accounts, emphasizing that the money would have to come from elsewhere in the Defense Department's budget.

President Bush used a nationally televised address in May 2006 to announce an initial deployment of 6,000 Guard troops mainly for border surveillance missions and construction. Troops would be withdrawn after the first year "as new Border Patrol agents and new technologies come online," Bush said.

But when the National Guard began reducing by half the number of its troops deployed to the border this summer, the redeployments immediately triggered concerns from lawmakers who feared that it was too soon to withdraw troops.

Indeed, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., succeeded in adding $794 million for the mission to the Defense appropriations bill just minutes before the Senate approved the measure. The Sessions amendment would have provided enough funding to keep 6,000 Guard troops deployed along the border throughout fiscal 2008.

The National Guard, however, has said it does not favor prolonging its mission because responsibility for border security ultimately must be transferred to the Border Patrol.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., who initially raised concerns about scaling back the Guard's presence along the southwest border, said Wednesday he supports the money approved in the Defense spending bill, as well as the measure's $3 million add-on for the New Mexico National Guard to conduct counter-drug missions.

"Operation Jumpstart was never intended to be a permanent program, but it has been successful so I'm glad we're at least providing $247 million for this initiative," Bingaman said in a statement.

The administration paid for the National Guard's border deployment by using $708 million in fiscal 2006 supplemental dollars, and then by reprogramming $415 million last year from unobligated Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery money.