PENTAGON BUDGET BLACKMAIL

Give us more money, or sol­diers aren’t going to get paid. That’s the cyn­i­cal game the Pentagon’s lead­er­ship has been play­ing with the Army’s bud­get in recent months. And now, it’s crunch time.
Since the fall, Rumsfeld & Co. have been dip­ping into the Army’s day-​​to-​​day funds — like money for sol­diers’ pay­checks — and then dar­ing Congress not to make up the dif­fer­ence with a sec­ond, “sup­ple­men­tal” pile of cash.
The tab comes due this Spring, Defense Daily reports. The Army needs $41 bil­lion of that sup­ple­men­tal kitty by then, or else it is going to go broke, with­out cash left to pay G.I.s.

Already, the ser­vice has pulled for­ward some $11 bil­lion in funds from the third and fourth quar­ters of its [fis­cal year 2005] bud­get, a senior Army bud­get offi­cer said at a brief­ing on Friday.
I think its early May when we run out of money, the offi­cial said. The most money is being spent on oper­a­tions and main­te­nance. What were doing right now is tak­ing monies from the fourth quar­ter and the third quar­ter­were already spend­ing, you know, my September pay­check.
Weve pulled in about the last five and a half months to spend in the first six and a half. 

That same offi­cial said that this sort of spend­ing has no prac­ti­cal effect on sol­diers, accord­ing to Defense Daily. And he’s prob­a­bly right, for the moment. What politi­cian would vote to deprive a sol­dier of his pay­check?
But key mem­bers of Congress, like Sen. John McCain, are get­ting increas­ingly fed up with this back­door effort to add tens of bil­lions to the defense bud­get by essen­tially hold­ing G.I.‘s liveli­hood hostage. Sooner or later, things are going to come to a head.

February 28th, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.