Basically, OMB told the Pentagon late last week that it wasn’t going to accept the fiscal 2010 budget request, written during the final hours of the Bush administration, as it came in a bloated $60 billion over the previous’ year’s tab. OMB — whose defense-spending office is headed by a sharp defense wonk named Steven Kosiak — told the Pentagon that it had to cap spending at $527 billion (excluding war costs!), which represents an eight percent budget increase over the fiscal 2009.

But, Rogin reports, that’s where the chicanery lies!

Defense budget experts have said the draft by the Joint Chiefs, which was never publicly released, was designed to pressure the Obama administration to drastically increase defense spending or be forced to defend a reluctance to do so. Defense officials in past outgoing administrations have left inflated budget estimates for incoming officials in the hope of raising the spending baseline. In fact, the draft budget was never scrubbed by Bush’s OMB, which had told federal agencies to submit draft budgets based on “current services.”

Here’s where it helps to have Defense Secretary Bob Gates impose some discipline. Getting eight percent more, outside the costs of the wars (!), during a time of global economic distress is, you know, really generous. An OMB official told Rogin that the Bush-drafted request was a “wish list” for conceivable defense spending — a classy little sayonara to the incoming Obama team — not a realistic budget. Gates has been telling anyone who will listen that the budget is coming down, hard choices are going to have to be made, and people are going to have to stop whining and reconcile themselves to this new reality. So it’ll be interesting to see if he starts with this budgetary gem.

But! I hear that he may send OMB a letter objecting to the $527 billion (outside of the wars!) ceiling. I’m trying to learn more about that now. Could it be that despite the resource-shift talk, Gates doesn’t mind a little budgetary good-cop-bad-cop?

[Gates] has formally adopted the concept that national security planning and budgeting cannot be done by the Pentagon alone, according to the Defense Department’s newly released Quadrennial Roles and Missions Review Report.

“The Department supports institutionalizing whole-of-government approaches to addressing national security challenges,” the document says, adding, “The desired end state is for U.S. Government national security partners to develop plans and conduct operations from a shared perspective.”

“Whole of government” was a phrase that Michele Flournoy, the incoming undersecretary of defense for policy, used at several points during her confirmation hearing two weeks ago. It’ll be interesting to see, despite the delay in presenting the Pentagon budget this year, how this all actually shakes out into budgetary decisions. Late last week, the White House Office of Management and Budget told the Pentagon to “substantial[ly]” restrain its planned fiscal 2010 budget, which the Bush administration beefed up by $60 billion over the 2009 budget before leaving office.