The Wartime Snapshot

CACNP Fellow Christopher Hellman, who was in town to brief his new primer on military spending, made an interesting observation yesterday about war funding in the Obama administration.

For years, budget analysts railed on the Bush administration for submitting its war funding requests outside of the normal budget process (i.e. as supplementals). Supplementals undermined budget planning and eroded congressional oversight by omitting detailed documentation, obscuring the basis of requests and viable funding alternatives, and failing to portray accurately the long-term costs associated with military operations. When the Obama administration routed its war requests through the regular order, we applauded the move.

As Chris pointed out yesterday, however, bundling war requests with the “base” Pentagon budget presents President Obama with a political problem. Right now, the administration wants to keep certain congressional add-ons out of the appropriations bill. So it is threatening a veto. Yet carrying out this threat would require Obama to veto not only the objectionable add-ons in the “base” budget, but also the entire tranche of war funding that is part and parcel of the bill. In other words, executing the veto threat to keep pork out of the bill would require Obama to delay funding for troops in the field, which is a political death sentence.

There’s not really a work-around for this problem, unless you want to rehash fights over the line item veto. All the White House can do is work the Hill to try and keep pork out of the bill in the first place. But that’s probably a lost cause this late in the FY 2010 cycle.

(Title from this one by the Mighty Mos, which I’ve been looping for 2 days)