Forbes reports that the Defense Department will be asking for $160 billion in supplemental appropriations to fund our war efforts for the balance of the fiscal year. This is just about double the supplemental appropriation of $82 billion and it is not counted in the official Pentagon budget, which is the largest in history.
Will there be any serious attempt by Congress to attempt to find out whether $160 billion is the correct amount? It would be nice if some steps were taken by Congress to ascertain the rationale behind the amount requested, to vet that it makes sense and, then, to devise metrics to make sure it was used that way. The metrics, by the way, could be kept by Mr. Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq.
An additional problem, in my view, is that the money is being asked for in a supplemental appropriation, which usually gets less scrutiny and may not be counted when computing the fiscal deficit (although I'm not positive on this last point).
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