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WAR-PRETEXT SLUSH FUND
By parsing through the documents that the Appropriations Committees released this week on their Omnibus, especially theJES, it is apparent that the plus-up they gave to DOD in the war-related portions of the DOD budget is far larger than the $5.8 billion that is apparent from the math (comparing the $79.4 billion request to the $85.2 billion appropriation).
To explain, note first that the appropriators took a few billion dollars out of the OCO fund. They removed $1.7 billion out of the amounts requested for military personnel. They also nixed a request of $3.1 billion for something called the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund and the Afghanistan Infrastructure Fund, declaring the need in the former “greatly overstated.” They also cut the notoriously ineffective Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Fund by $130 million; they reduced a classified program by $58 million, and they made other smaller miscellaneous cuts. It all totals something just over $5 billion.
Then they added: $50 million for MRAP vehicle modifications, $90 million for a new CV-22 Osprey, and then came two mother loads. $9.3 billion was added for the various Operation and Maintenance (O&M) accounts of the military services, and $1 billion was added for equipment for the National Guard and Reserves. There were also various small miscellaneous adds.
In sum, the House and Senate appropriators cut Obama’s OCO account by over $5 billion, and then they added $5.8 billion to the requested amount. The full plus-up for DOD in the OCO fund is $10.8 billion, more than double the “$5 billion” reported by the some in the press.
The two biggest additions have little to do with “war-related” activities, however. Every bit of the $9.3 billion added for O&M in the OCO account was transferred from the “base” (non-war) parts of the bill. The appropriations committees were simply transferring money from the “base” accounts to the OCO accounts.
Because the Budget Control Act of 2011 and subsequent congressional budget deals put a cap on 2014 “base” Pentagon spending, the appropriators were simply creating a hole there into which they could pour more money (more on this later). They had reason to do this because the past budget deals put no cap whatsoever on the OCO accounts: in budget-gimmick terms; it’s all free (uncapped) money.
It is a loophole quite consciously created by the congressional budget negotiators, and it is not new. The basic gimmick is decades old, and today’s appropriators are using it to the hilt, surely motivated by the assertion that DOD suffers from “austerity.” Routine peacetime O&M money magically becomes “emergency” and “war-related,” and it all happens to be unconstrained under existing budget rules. That the purpose for which the money is used does not change one iota is immaterial.
The pretext is even clearer in the $1 billion fund created for equipment for the National Guard and Reserves. The added hardware in this account includes aircraft countermeasures and equipment to face an enemy that has no air defense, chemical and biological warfare equipment for a theater that includes no chem-bio warfare, new AESA radars for aircraft that will not need it in Afghanistan, forklifts and even “high-density storage cabinets.” So much for “war-related.” This perennial plus-up, usually added to the base portions of defense bills, is put in the OCO fund simply because money there does not count under budget caps, pure and simple.
The OCO account is not an emergency war fund; it is and should be known as a War-Pretext Slush Fund.
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