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Show Me the Money

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Jane Harman contributed a short analysis to a debate on the U.S. defense budget for Politico’s “The Agenda,” arguing that expenditures for the latest counter-terrorism efforts against ISIL should be part of Congressionally authorized defense expenditures rather than in a separate fund.

Something has to give.

President Obama is funding the air campaign in Iraq and Syria as part of “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO), a $58.6 billion pot of funding only loosely tied to a strategic framework for combatting terrorism. OCO eats up a sizeable fraction of the Pentagon’s sequestration-era budget, and some call it a counterterrorism “slush fund.” Costs of the war against the Islamic State (also known as ISIL), drawn out of this account, tally nearly $1 billion to date. The problem: Emergency expenses like these will shortchange investments in our future security—especially given the budgetary pressure of the sequester.

I’ve seen this movie before. When the Berlin Wall came down, the George H.W. Bush administration declared a “peace dividend,” making substantial cuts to procurement budgets for defense and intelligence. Not long afterward, when I arrived in Congress in 1993 representing the heart of California’s aerospace industry, my district had been devastated. Pink slips were flying left and right, and the triple Ph.D.s who had invented the technologies that won the Cold War were themselves out in the cold. But rocket scientists don’t grow on trees, and the world, it turned out, hadn’t gotten safer at all; soon, the United States was scrambling to rebuild the defense capacity it had too quickly sacrificed. It’s a lesson Congress should heed today, by acting quickly and putting a tourniquet around the hemorrhaging defense budget.

The cuts currently in place will deplete our stock of modern defense platforms, compromise training and readiness, and reduce our ability to fund research for new tools designed to fight the wars of the future. Destroyers and aircraft carriers—like the USS George H.W. Bush, used in some of the airstrikes against ISIL—are extremely expensive to build and maintain, but they’re also crucial to our ability to project power. Ditto the F22 Raptor, which flew for the first time on bombing runs in Syria. These are vital resources for countering the dangers we face today—as well as the threats we expect tomorrow.

While a Blue Dog in Congress, I was part of the cabal that insisted war expenditures be “on budget”—part of authorized defense expenditures. President George W. Bush agreed, but we have never achieved the desired transparency.

So what to do? Congress should return now to authorize the new mission against ISIL, and set a budget that lines up our money with our priorities. This country needs a ready force on call—not a Potemkin Pentagon. It’s the responsibility of Congress to budget for this. With a new war on, Congress must show how it will be paid for.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author. 

This article was originally posted on Politico's "The Agenda".

About the Author

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Jane Harman

Distinguished Fellow and President Emerita, Wilson Center

Jane Harman, Distinguished Fellow and President Emerita, Wilson Center, is an internationally recognized authority on U.S. and global security issues, foreign relations and lawmaking. A native of Los Angeles and a public-school graduate, she went on to become a nine-term member of Congress, serving decades on the major security committees in the House of Representatives. Drawing upon a career that has included service as President Carter’s Secretary of the Cabinet and hundreds of diplomatic missions to foreign countries, Harman holds posts on nearly a dozen governmental and non-governmental advisory boards and commissions.

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