Yesterday I discussed White House plans to cap defense spending to 0% growth and its dictate for the Pentagon to reshuffle 11% of its budget to make way for "new initiatives." What are those "initiatives"?
According to today's Washington Post:
The Democratic-controlled House is poised to give the Pentagon dozens of new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the military does not need to fund next year, acting in many cases in response to defense industry pressures and campaign contributions under an approach he has decried as "business as usual" and vowed to help end.
The White House has said that some but not all of the extra expenditures could draw a presidential veto of the Defense Department's entire $636 billion budget for 2010,...
Gates vowed in April to fundamentally overhaul the military's "approach to procurement, acquisition and contracting" and urged Congress to support the termination of many traditional weapons programs in favor of more spending on counterinsurgency efforts and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this round, those Democratic and Republican lawmakers who support maintaining or expanding programs that Gates proposed to eliminate or trim appear likely to prevail, because an unusually restrictive rule for floor debate agreed upon Wednesday will allow only amendments that could strip less than half of the spending the administration did not request.
I think this is a smokescreen. I believe a significant portion of this “initiatives” will be pork payoffs to lure key senators and congressmen to support Obama's domestic programs, like healthcare and energy. President Obama is hurting in the polls, and these are Chicago-style payoffs to help his legislation get back on track.
Obama is sending Gates out as a sacrificial lamb to show how publicly how committed he is cutting wasteful Pentagon spending. Nevertheless, he’ll sign the defense bill when shows up on his desk, loaded with defense pork for the likes of Murtha and, not surprisingly, numerous Blue Dog Dems and RHINO Republicans. These will be the legislators who will suddenly support his gov't healthcare bill. He'll say he did his best to control pork and, most importantly, the overall defense budget will be about the same as the previous year. All the pork will come out of other stressed Pentagon accounts, like manpower, research and development, training, and acquisitions.
Winners: Obama will get his key votes for his real agenda and legislators will get goodies for their states.
Losers: Gates will be handed a defeat at the hands of his new boss (who will keep him on as SecDef "with full confidence and support"). The media will decry Gates as a failed reformer who couldn't fight the Pentagon's established bureaucracy. The Pentagon will get programs it doesn't want and blame it doesn't deserve.