Funny Money on Iraq

NYT Editorial

President Bush is trying to score unearned points for fiscal rectitude by railing against the Senate's outsize $109 billion supplemental spending package, which includes money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as hurricane relief. But the real scandal is Mr. Bush's own preference for financing much of the cost of the Iraq war outside the normal budget process. That is convenient for the administration, which does not have to count the money when it is pretending to balance the budget. But Iraq is not some kind of unexpected emergency, like Hurricane Katrina. It is a highly predictable cost, now amounting to about $100 billion a year, or just under 20 percent of total military spending.

Moving the war's financing off budget is no mere technical distinction. For one thing, it subjects the military's spending requests to less careful Congressional committee scrutiny than they would receive during the usual budget process. More important, this fiscal sleight of hand makes it that much easier for the Pentagon to duck the hard choices it desperately needs to be making between optional and costly futuristic weapons and pressing real-world needs.

The Pentagon's latest $460 billion budget request reflects exactly the kinds of distortions that gimmicky cost-shifting produces. There is no serious pressure to economize to pay for those uncounted war costs. So the budget barrels ahead with unrealistic long-term spending projects that the services and the nation will ultimately be unable to afford, piling on stealth destroyers and air combat fighters designed for the cold war while soldiers go short of armor and adequate reinforcements in Iraq.

Making matters worse, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shunted aside all pleas to expand the size of America's weary and badly overstrained ground forces to preserve even more dollars for wasteful weapons spending.

Congress would gladly vote the Pentagon every cent it needs to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and rebuild its ground forces so that they are available for other military emergencies. But with so much of the war off budget, as it were, Congress is instead being asked to approve one of the biggest military budgets in American history for projects having little to do with current fighting.

The regular defense budget, at least, goes through protracted review by specialized authorization and appropriation committees that have some familiarity with military operations. That does not prevent a lot of pork being included. But the process is far more considered and transparent than the circuses that govern supplemental spending.

The Bush administration has not done a very good job of talking straight to the American people about Iraq. If it wants to start winning back some of its squandered credibility, honest budgeting would be one good place to start.