Democrats don't care about our nation's security is about as old a saw as exists in Washington, and it's been trotted out in the last few days by Robert Kagan in the Wash Post and Tony Blankley in the Wash Times. Blankley:
Officially the Office of Management and Budget is claiming that the budget will increase by 8 percent. But because most of the Iraq and Afghanistan war costs have been funded through supplemental appropriations, rather than the regular Department budget, total military funding remains a mystery. Mark me down as suspicious.
I have been told by sources at the Pentagon that they have been told to not expect full funding of all existing programs. And there is evidence that Obama has apparently been planning to force cuts on our military for some time.
Naturally, Fox News has picked up the narrative. But the facts are that Obama's Office of Management and Budget is setting Pentagon spending for the coming fiscal year at exactly the level the Bush administration recommended. Here's CQ:
The Obama administration has given the Pentagon a $527 billion limit, excluding war costs, for its fiscal 2010 Defense budget, an Office of Management and Budget official said Monday.
If enacted, that would be about $14 billion more than the $513 billion allocated for fiscal 2009 (PL 110-329), including military construction funds, and it would match what the Bush administration estimated last year for the Pentagon in fiscal 2010.
But it sets up a potential conflict between the new administration and the Defense Department's entrenched bureaucracy, which has remained largely intact through the presidential transition. Some Pentagon officials and congressional conservatives are already trying to portray the OMB number as a cut by comparing it with a $584 billion draft budget request compiled last fall by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for fiscal 2010.
The $527 billion figure is "what the Bush people thought was the right number last February, and that's the number we're going with," said the OMB official, who declined to be identified. "The Joint Chiefs did that to lay down a marker for the incoming administration that was unrealistic. It's more of a wish list than anything else."
Defense budget experts have said the draft by the Joint Chiefs, which was never publicly released, was designed to pressure the Obama administration to drastically increase Defense spending or be forced to defend a reluctance to do so.
Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman have both been on this. Funny how when it comes to Pentagon spending, a refusal to comply with a Christmas-tree wish list is a cut, but when it comes to transit or education, a modest increase constitutes spending taxpayers into the ground.
