Posted by Mark Silva at 6:30 am CST
In the pursuit of wartime budget-making, the Bush administration has worked outside the bounds of the traditional federal budget. So when President Bush proposes a new nearly $3-trillion federal budget next week, he also will be seeking another $245 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That includes $99.6 billion in additional war-spending for the remainder of the 2007 budget year, which closes at the end of September, plus another $145.2 billion in supplemental war spending for the 2008 budget year, according to a senior administration official. The White House will officially roll out its new budgets on Monday.
All told, taking into account all of the president's supplemental war budgets, this places the projected costs of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan at close to $700 billion by the end of 2008.
As the Senate debates non-binding resolutions protesting the president's new deployment of troops in Iraq, Democrats acknowledge that they lack the votes to take their sentiments any further at this point – actually restricting war spending. In any event, the White House maintains it has the money needed.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), while promising that U.S. troops "will receive everything they need to do their jobs,'' also warns that the president's newest war budget will get closer scrutiny than the nearly $400 billion in war spending that has preceded it.
"We will also subject this supplemental to the tough and serious oversight that Congress has ignored for four years. Furthermore, we believe this should be the last such supplemental appropriation,'' Reid said in a statement issued Friday night. "It is past time for the president to accurately and appropriately budget for this war and give the American people a full accounting of its true cost.
"America has already spent almost $400 billion on this war, too much of which has been wasted on boondoggles like Olympic-sized swimming pools in unused multi-million dollar training camps in the desert.,'' Reid said. "The American people deserve better.''
Yet the non-binding resolution that senators will debate next week falls far short of any spending-restriction -- with some Democrats planning to oppose the resolution for its lack of real restraint. on the president's war policy.
Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, was asked this week what the president will do once a resolution is adopted. The president, he said, will press ahead with the new troop deployment.
But down the road, the president and a war-weary Congress will have plenty to talk about. The new, $245 billion in war spending that the White House spells out next week will not be the end of Bush's requests.
The White House, warning that this is a long war, plans to set aside a "place-holding'' $50 billion for war in the 2009 budget, though these place-holders typically have been followed by supplemental requests.
This is not the first year the White House has sought nearly $100 billion in supplemental war spending.
Last February, the White House sought a supplemental $72.4 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to get through the remainder of the 2006 budget year.
The year before, in February 2005, the White House sought a supplemental $81.9 billion.
All of this comes in addition to what the federal government is budgeting for defense, which has seen a nearly 50 percent boost in spending since the start of the Bush administration in 2001.
The defense budget that Bush seeks in his new 2008 budget will be nearly $500 billion, a 10 percent increase for the coming year. Add that to the $245 billion in war spending to finish this year and finance the next year, and the total will exceed $700 billion -- more than the overall Gross Domestic Product of all but about a dozen nations.
