Military leaders asked for budget answers

WASHINGTON – The chiefs of the military services faced sharp questioning on Capitol Hill on Thursday for submitting a $419 billion Pentagon budget that senators described as artificially low, with regular military costs left for an upcoming emergency spending bill.

Costs for 30,000 extra Army soldiers, 3,000 additional Marines and military equipment should be included in the regular 2006 Defense spending measure – not the $80 billion emergency war bill the Bush administration will seek next week, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee said.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said that moving costs out of the regular budget and into the war bill prevents Congress from closely examining the costs of war. It “removes from our oversight responsibilities the scrutiny that these programs deserve,” he said.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the panel’s ranking Democrat, demanded to know why the $3.5 billion cost of 30,000 Army soldiers – added in 2004 – was excluded from President Bush’s proposed Defense budget, which funded only 482,000.

“Why is the full 512,000 not funded in the budget request?” Levin asked.

The Defense measure funds the Pentagon beginning with the start of the 2006 fiscal year in October. The emergency war measure was intended to provide funding for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the current fiscal year.

Lawmakers have been rankled by the Bush administration’s use of so-called “supplemental” budget requests to cover the wars. It is politically perilous to oppose the supplemental measure, which is seen as needed to sustain U.S. troops abroad. But the bill covers costs that many critics contend should be included in the more intensely debated 2006 budget.

Thursday’s session put the uniformed chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines in the uncomfortable position of defending a spending plan that ultimately was decided by Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with advice from the commanders.