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WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush will request slightly more than $100 billion to cover war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of this year and an even larger amount for fiscal 2008 that begins on Oct. 1, congressional sources said on Thursday.
The administration, which will submit the war cost proposals along with its annual budget on Monday, will provide details of its war spending plans to try to placate critics who have accused it of using a shadow budget to fund the war.
For the current fiscal year, the White House will ask Congress to approve an additional $93 billion for the Defense Department to conduct the two wars and about $7 billion for State Department activities, a Senate aide said.
Including other items, the request will total “a little over $100 billion,” according to the Senate aide. That would come on top of $70 billion Congress already approved for the wars this year.
For 2008, the administration will ask for an amount “larger than the $100 billion in the fiscal 2007 request,” the Senate aide said.
House and Senate aides said the administration was trying to detail the 2008 costs in advance, responding to complaints from Congress about the long line of “emergency” spending bills that have mostly funded the Iraq war since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
BIGGEST SO FAR
At about $100 billion, the fiscal 2007 emergency request would be the biggest so far.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated Bush's planned troop buildup could cost at least double the administration's initial estimate and involve more than twice the number of troops.
The price tag could reach about $13 billion for a four-month mission, the nonpartisan CBO said. The roughly 20,000 combat soldiers Bush said he was going to deploy to Iraq might have to be augmented by 28,000 support troops, it said.
A U.S. defense official said the Pentagon did not believe the CBO's figure for support troops was realistic.
“Our estimate is that it would be far less than their worst-case scenario,” commented the official, who said he would not comment on the record or offer an alternative figure as military planners were still working on their estimates.
In January, the Bush administration estimated a cost of $5.6 billion to dispatch 21,500 troops.
A Bush administration official said details of both years' war spending proposals would be provided in the budget book outlining the 2008 spending plans.
It also will include a forecast for war spending in fiscal 2009 but not beyond that. “That's about as far out as you can realistically project,” the official said.
In a letter to Bush in December, three lawmakers said the use of emergency bills had created an “ever-expanding shadow budget” that was obscuring Congress's oversight process and skewing budget deficit projections.
It was signed by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota and House of Representatives Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt of South Carolina, both Democrats, and New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, senior Budget Committee Republican.
Administration officials say they do not object to greater transparency but are using emergency bills to avoid having the costs viewed as part of the Pentagon's permanent budget. If such costs were incorporated into the main Pentagon budget, it would be politically difficult to scale them back when it is time to do so.
But the Bush administration hopes plenty of details on the spending plans will satisfy congressional demands.
“We're going to try to be much more transparent on the costs of the war,” White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray)
