A small article from The Hill caught my attention Friday evening, because it illustrates how complex the federal appropriations puzzle really is.  The Congressional Black Caucus is upset after White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel promised Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) $1.5 billion in farm disaster relief in exchange for her support of the (soon-to-be filibustered) small-business bill.  The CBC is miffed because the administration is stonewalling them on the settlement of Pigford v. Glickman:

Six members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to President Obama on Thursday calling on him to find a way to compensate black farmers who suffered discrimination in government loan programs during the 1980s and 1990s.
[snip]
…the administration has told black farmers it lacks the funds to pay a $1.2 billion agreement they reached with the Department of Agriculture in 1999 to settle the Pigford class-action lawsuit.
[snip]
The lawmakers say that Obama should also take administrative action to pay $3.4 billion the federal government promised to settle claims that it mismanaged Native American trust funds. Elouise Cobell is the lead plaintiff in the case against the Interior Department.

Lincoln’s $1.5 billion was originally part of the small-business bill and was later removed in a vain effort to curry Republican support.

What does this have to do with defense spending?

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Iraq & Afghanistan, Congress, Defense Spending, Congressional Black Caucus (all tags)

Two months after the Senate first passed their version of the war supplemental, the House passed the final version of the bill yesterday, 308-114.  Now all that stands between the military and a delicious $37.1 billion is the stroke of President Obama’s pen, coming in the next few days.

We’ve reported on this bill twice already, tracking its progress through Congress.  

A quick recap:

The Senate version of the bill, passed May 27, contained $58.8 billion in spending, including $37.1 billion for the war, over $13 billion for Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, $5.1 billion for FEMA, and $2.9 billion for Haiti disaster relief, as well as a host of smaller expenditures.

The House then passed its version of the bill on July 1, which accepted the Senate version while adding $22.8 billion in spending fully offset by $23.5 billion in cuts and law modifications.  This included a $10 billion education jobs fund, $1 billion for youth summer jobs, $5 billion in Pell grants, $4.6 billion to settle two class-action lawsuits, and $701 million for border security.

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Security Matters, Iraq & Afghanistan, Defense Spending, War supplemental, Congress (all tags)

The United States and South Korea announced a series of joint naval exercises in the Pacific theater on Tuesday, designed to show force and resolve against a stubborn North Korea.  The first of the exercises will begin Sunday and will include ships, aircraft, sailors, and airmen (for a total of about 8,000 personnel) from both the US and Republic of Korea navy and air force.

The display is a direct response to and a continuation of the crisis begun when the South Korean frigate Cheonan was sunk off the coast of the Korean Peninsula on March 26.  An international investigation team concluded that the Cheonan was hit by a torpedo launched from a North Korean submarine, a charge North Korea and its ally, China, have denied.

The statement said that the exercises “are designed to send a clear message to North Korea that its aggressive behavior must stop.”  They will occur in both the East and West Seas, known to Americans as Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan.

The military presence is quite large, with over a hundred aircraft and 20 ships and submarines, including the American aircraft carrier the USS George Washington.

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Security Matters, North Korea, Navy (all tags)

All too often, defense programs consume resources like a fountain consumes water in a public park—always flowing regardless of cost or necessity.  Programs with no clear use running billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule remain fiendishly difficult to kill.  It is this unfortunate reality that made the July 13 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management so refreshing.

Department of Defense officials emphatically pressed lawmakers to cease production of any more C-17 cargo planes, saying they were neither requested nor required.  Indeed, they said, the current capabilities of our strategic airlift fleet exceed the military's present-day needs as well as worst-case scenario projections.  Purchasing additional C-17 aircraft would run contrary to Defense Secretary Robert Gates' goal of saving $100 billion over the next five years and would necessitate cutbacks in other DoD programs.

(More after the jump)

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Security Matters, defense spending, pentagon, homeland security, strategic airlift (all tags)

Time and time again, politicians, pundits, and security experts have painted the terrifying picture of a mushroom cloud looming over the vaporized remains of an American city.  If you look at the budget for missile defense (DoD has requested approximately $10 billion for FY 2011) you’d think that the most likely attack on the United States would come via a ballistic missile, given that what the U.S. spends on missile defense greatly exceeds combined spending on domestic and international maritime and port of entry interdiction efforts and nuclear detection activities.

The dirty little secret of domestic nuclear defense, however, is that should the US ever come under nuclear attack, odds are that it will not come from a missile launch.  Instead, a nuclear device or dirty bomb is likely to be delivered from a non-missile source, such as a container entering a U.S. port..  On June 30, witnesses at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs revealed that the US remains woefully vulnerable to this kind of threat…

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Nukes on a Blog, Security Matters, nuclear weapons, border security, missile defense, nuclear terrorism (all tags)

Over the past several months, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others have urged Congress to pass a $33 billion supplemental spending request to continue funding the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In recent weeks, the tone of the rhetoric has intensified, with Gates warning that the military may have to start doing “stupid things” if the supplemental is not passed by the upcoming July 4th recess.  Even General David Petraeus has weighed in on the issue in recent days, urging the House to pass the bill during his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

Reversing the usual pattern, the Senate passed its version of the bill on May 27, but the bill has stalled in the House, largely due to two concurrent factors:

1) Large-scale defections of Democratic representatives who do not wish to go on record as having voted for more war funding, and;
2) Republican resistance to billions in spending that has been tacked on to the bill for programs unrelated to the war.  These include aid to Haiti, other disaster relief funds, disability payments to veterans, and much more.

Congress won’t make its July 4 deadline for a conference agreement, but the House hopes to pass its version of the bill later today.  In the final scramble, the bill is changing by the hour, but as of June 30 it had ballooned to nearly $75 billion.

(Highlights of the bill after the jump)

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Security Matters, Iraq & Afghanistan, war supplemental, pork, defense spending (all tags)