by Paul Shinkman
\nFeb. 12, 2016<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been called war planners\u2019 crack cocaine, a shifty accounting scheme or a habit-forming opiate imbibed government-wide. Barack Obama pledged to eliminate it at the beginning of his presidency, but its potency has only grown stronger since. Now, it accounts for the unregulated spending of $60 billion or more in taxpayer dollars per year, with no end in sight.<\/p>\n
Get used to the Overseas Contingency Operations budget.<\/p>\n
The OCO was known from 2001 to 2009 as \u201cthe supplemental\u201d and is now considered a de facto slush fund. It began as the war budget President George W. Bush needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan without having to go back to Congress every time the Defense Department needed to modify its main half-trillion-dollar budget to account for changing battlefield conditions or the development of new technology.<\/p>\n
It is necessary at times. When insurgents intensified attacks using improvised explosive devices to blow up coalition convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military tapped the fund to quickly purchase and deploy<\/a>\u00a0newly developed mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, which ultimately replaced Humvees.<\/p>\n Related: 3 Things to Consider With the New Pentagon Budget<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n But another benefit for war planners is that<\/a>\u00a0the Pentagon does not have to release details publicly on how specifically this money will be spent.<\/p>\n As a result, what was once restricted to a fund to replace blown-up tanks, get more bullets and transport troops in and out of faraway war zones has ballooned into an ambiguous part of the budget to which government financiers increasingly turn to pay for other, at times unrelated, costs.<\/p>\n The contingency fund has been used to buy sophisticated fighter jets that never dropped bombs on Middle East war zones, for example, or to pay soldiers while serving stateside. And it has not decreased under Obama\u2019s withdrawals from protracted war in the Middle East. Quite the contrary \u2013 this year the proposed budget actually grew by $200 million despite thousands fewer combat troops in Afghanistan and, technically, none in Iraq.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just Obama. Limited during budget negotiations this year by sequestration caps, the Republican Congress proposed bypassing the across-the-board spending cuts by funneling increases in defense money into the contingency fund.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody in the whole system has drunk the magic elixir,\u201d says Gordon Adams, a senior adviser for national security in Bill Clinton\u2019s Office of Management and Budget who served on Obama\u2019s transition team in 2009. \u201cThe administration will put in their stuff they want to test the base budget with. The Pentagon has put the stuff in there that won\u2019t stress out the service chiefs. The appropriators put stuff in there that serves their interests. And they move money around like Three-Card Monty.<\/p>\n \u201cNow everybody\u2019s corrupt with regard to OCO.\u201d<\/p>\n Related: The Pentagon’s Overseas Slush Fund is Getting Even Slushier<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The president this year released an OCO budget of $58.8 billion, in addition to the $582.7 billion base budget, up from the contingency fund\u2019s $58.6 billion budget last year and a base budget of $580.3 billion. This year\u2019s contingency actually accounts for an expansion of the U.S. presence overseas, including a new line item for counterterrorism operations in Africa and more than quadrupling the $800 million needed last year for operations in Europe to counter Russia\u2019s aggression.<\/p>\n These funds could go to bolstering the U.S. drone base in Djibouti, or pay for special operators to infiltrate Libya to fight the Islamic State group. Or, as it has previously, the fund could purchase new F-22 Raptor fighter jets, which are used in a limited capacity overseas, or to modernize the M-1 Abrams tank fleet \u2013 all items that should be included in the bulging, but public, defense base budget.<\/p>\n Add to that the $53 billion budget request Director of National Security James Clapper announced this week \u2013 a classified budget he said the intelligence community will use to contribute further to the contingency fund.<\/p>\n Obama through the OMB asserted early in his administration that he wished to do away with OCO spending<\/a> in keeping with his campaign pledge to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n \u201cWe haven\u2019t made a lot of progress on that,\u201d Mike McCord, the Pentagon\u2019s comptroller and general budget guru told reporters this week. \u201cAnd I would say the budget deal that was enacted last November went exactly the opposite direction from that.\u201d<\/p>\n This leaves the future of the contingency fund uncertain, particularly as government officials prepare to turn over responsibility to a new administration. The next president will likely take a new look at that part of the budget to add more predictability to overall budget requests, but the lack of progress during this administration doesn\u2019t bode well.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I think the battlefield\u2019s fairly confused now, I have to say,\u201d McCord said, \u201cIn terms of, \u2018Is there going to be an OCO budget in the future that looks like it does now?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It almost certainly will.<\/p>\n Related: Despite Budget Deal, Pentagon Slush Fund Survives<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Congressional action to reign in spending on what should be the war budget has failed in recent years. Rep. Mick Mulvaney attempted to add an amendment to the military budget in 2014 that would have limited the contingency budget. The South Carolina Republican framed the restrictions around a memo<\/a> OMB put out in 2010, cataloguing specifically what could and could not be included in OCO.<\/p>\n \u201cThe war budget has been used for years as a slush fund of sorts to get around budget limits,\u201d Mulvaney told McClatchy<\/a> at the time.<\/p>\n This rule would have prohibited, for example, the Air Force buying more F-15s, since none were lost in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or purchase more Stryker vehicles for the Army, which should be included in its long-term planning. It also would have stopped, as Mulvaney frequently cited, the purchase of a V-22 Osprey destroyed during a training exercise in Florida.<\/p>\n