President Bush's fiscal 2005 budget has more holes in it than Swiss cheese and the biggest, most gaping hole is the omission of the cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In his State of the Union speech in January, the President said he would be presenting to Congress a budget that "funds the war." Yet, the budget released earlier this month does not include any funds for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, which his own Office of Management and Budget estimates will cost $50 billion.
We are now in the second year of operations in Iraq and in the third year of operations in Afghanistan. The Administration plans to fund both of these operations outside of the $402 billion Department of Defense budget request.
This means that the $521 billion deficit forecast for this year will grow even wider and the Congress will be considering a federal budget that does not reflect the true extent of government spending for the coming year. By continuing to conceal the true cost of the war, the Bush Administration is once again withholding critical information and misleading the American people about the war in Iraq.
When I asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week during a hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense why the Administration did not provide any funding for the war, he responded that they didn't know how much it was going to cost and wanted to wait until the fall to give a more accurate number.
Yet, the military does in fact have an estimate of the cost of the war. To wait until after the presidential election is blatantly playing politics in everyone's perspective and it should not go unchallenged.
Even Republicans are dismayed at the President's lack of fiscal integrity with the budget. When I raised this issue with OMB Director Josh Bolten during a Budget Committee hearing, the Republican chairman agreed with me that "zero" was an unacceptable number. The Administration, Chairman Jim Nussle reinforced to Mr. Bolten, must provide a number for the cost of the war and should do it sooner rather than later.
Mr. Bolten offered boilerplate comments during the hearing, noting that it was better to fund wars through supplemental appropriations bills and that the Administration would present one after the election. Historically, Mr. Bolten's claim is not consistently true and his statements miss the point.
The Administration must be up front with the American public about how much the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to cost. We owe it to the American taxpayer to be as honest and forthright as we can about how we are funding this war.
During the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, I also asked Secretary Rumsfeld about the Administration's budget proposal that would give federal civilian employees a pay raise of 1.5 percent while giving military personnel a 3.5 percent raise. Secretary Rumsfeld manages more than 648,000 civilian employees, whose take home pay has declined for the past several years as a result of double-digit increases in health care premiums.
Both civilian and military personnel are deserving of an equitable and fair pay raise for the work they do. In fact, in the DOD there is a symbiotic relationship between our civilian employees and the men and women in uniform who are fighting in Iraq and other trouble spots in the world.
In many respects, we need to put as much of a priority on recruiting the most capable individuals we can on the civilian side since they are running the computer systems, handling sensitive materials and overseeing the weapons programs that our troops in the field must depend upon.
There is a 32 percent gap between the compensation levels of federal civilian employees and those of private sector workers. Along with this gap and the impending retirement of half of the civil service over the next decade, it is imperative for the federal government to start acting in a way that will attract and retain new workers.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, it was thought more Americans would answer the call to public service. Max Stier, the president of the non-profit Partnership for Public Service, throws cold water on that theory.
In a recent editorial written for Government Executive magazine, Stier notes that in the 1960s, 30 percent of law school graduates went to work for the federal government; now that number is 3 percent. Today, he says, there are more federal employees in their 60s than in their 20s, noting that over the next decade, half of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire.
We must take the steps now to attract and retain younger workers, especially in the areas of national security where technical skills and institutional knowledge are so important. The President's misguided approach to pay increases is only likely to hasten the retirement of some of our most experienced and indispensable civil servants.
