Yesterday I reported that Rep. John McHugh (R-NY), ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, had said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ budget proposal was “tantamount to an $8 billion cut in defense spending.” His staff had a difficult time defending the number, though, reiterating several times that the figure had come from senior Pentagon officials who’d briefed the committee in advance of Gates’ speech.
I just got off the phone with a Pentagon spokesman who said he couldn’t get into details about the briefing itself, but that the Pentagon stands by Gates’ representation that his outline, if approved by Congress, would amount to a spending increase.
“If people in Congress want to go on the record with what they think they heard” that’s their right, said Commander Darryn James.
McHugh’s staff says that, though the bottom line on Gates’ request is greater than the bottom line on the DOD’s budget last year, he’s hiding some cost cuts. Some of the increase, they say, comes from inflation, and several billion dollars more come from programs that Gates has migrated from the Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental into the base budget.
But when pressed, they didn’t stand by the interpretation that these changes masked what otherwise would have been a budget cut. And, significantly, spending on the Pentagon and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is projected to total $664 billion in FY 2010–up nearly $10 billion from last year.
Unless details about that briefing emerge, it will be difficult to say for sure whether the notion of an $8 billion cut originated at the Pentagon, or if it’s a conclusion McHugh and his staff arrived at on their own.
