Former New Mexico Republican Gov. Gary Johnson is sometimes referred to as a libertarian for his limited government positions, of which he says he’s seen a real embrace. And after decades of growing government spending, Johnson believes the country is finally serious about addressing the federal budget deficit. More…
Preempting Washington politicians looking for easy ways to close the deficit and reduce the debt, the Pentagon is trimming its own budget. Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced he will close a base, reduce the number of generals and take other measures to slim the military.
Few communities of Washington wonks run into greater structural and institutional obstacles than advocates of reduced defense spending. Defense companies put billions into PR campaigns for the necessity of this or that project that runs over cost. Legislators have every career incentive to lard the defense budget with job-creating bloat More…
OK, one more Pentagon budget chart. This should give a sense of the Pentagon budget in a broader context. Even through the Bush years, there ran a critique that the U.S. was “only” spending 3.5 percent of GDP on defense. One Rumsfeld enthusiast called that paltry sum More…
Below is the Pentagon’s presentation of the long-term budget picture. Why’s it going from Fiscal 2001 to Fiscal 2015? I don’t presume to know for sure. But the effect is clear: It’s immediately obvious that President Obama is proposing spending more, consistently, on defense — excluding the cost of the More…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have just begun their Pentagon budget and QDR press briefings. Here’s what they’re asking Congress to approve for the next year: $548.9 billion for the so-called base budget next year, excluding the cost of More…
President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that national security programs would not be subject to his proposed spending freeze. But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon officials from placing what they consider to be outdated military programs in the budgetary icebox.
In its master planning document for More…
Apropos of my story today about the consistently-ballooning defense budget, Defense News has a leak of the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s big planning document that, among other things, is supposed to shape the budget. This is just a leak of a draft, and not the final document. More…
Since I’ve been singing the praises of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments all day, I leave this one to Colin Clark of DODBuzz:
“I can tell you there is no way the defense budget will be immune to budget reduction efforts,” Stan Collender, one of Washington’s
And to think, I was just mentioning Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in this post about the Obama administration’s questionable decision to exempt defense and homeland security spending from its desired budget freeze. Here’s Harrison’s just-released paper (PDF) about the unsustainability of current More…
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