War Games

The President’s budget disparages gimmicks and declares “a return to honest budgeting.” But his fiscal plan then goes on to claim $1.5 billion in war “savings” that, upon closer examination, prove to be an illusion.

The budget employs a deception, asserting $1.6 trillion in “savings” and $1.5 trillion in “deficit reduction” by projecting a benchmark level of future spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that no one was anticipating. Put another way, the administration budget assumes an elevated path of war spending that was never going to be followed, and then claims savings through a reduction that was going to occur anyway.

The maneuver would be troubling enough in itself. It is even more so considering these war spending “reductions” represent three-fourths of the $2 trillion in line-by-line budgetary “savings” the President promised in his Address to a Joint Session of Congress. It is equally disturbing in light of the President’s vow to discard such “gimmicks” and “sleights of hand.” The stratagem becomes thoroughly untenable to the extent the President plans to spend these nonexistent savings: the spending surely will occur, but the “newly available” resources will never materialize.

Read the full report here.