Kevin Colby: News, culture, political blog

An interesting article from Taxpayers for Common Sense:

Congress has passed the $789 billion stimulus bill intended to jolt the economy.  After a lot of debate, tens of billions of dollars were cut from the House and Senate versions of the bill. Of course there is still more that should have been cut.

But in the effort to stop waste, fraud, and abuse in the economic stimulus funds, final passage of the bill isn’t the end. It’s only the end of the beginning.

Much of the stimulus funding is heading out of the treasury directly to federal agencies, states, and localities. This means the funding decisions will be distributed across the country, making it a massive challenge to track and follow. To assist this, the bill directs the creation of a central tracking web site, www.recovery.gov. Here, information about every project and every contract award is supposed to be posted. Separately, a panel is created to conduct oversight over the entire project. Additional funding is also added for Inspectors General (IGs) of affected agencies, and there is more money for the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  Read the full story.

Some interesting articles to read:

Just in time for a new war funding request to hit Capitol Hill, a trio of recently released documents recall just how badly the Pentagon managed the hundreds of billions spent to date on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First there is the book-length report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) recounting how the Iraq war became a bottomless money pit. One passage describes how DOD managers in Iraq launched DOD’s current dependence on “emergency” supplemental spending bills in 2003 when they hired a lobbyist to convince Congress they needed extra money to finance a long list of reconstruction projects.

Then there’s a study by thenonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments assessing the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at $906 billion, including money for training Iraqi troops, veteran services and diplomatic programs. The report echoes our persistent concerns that the supplementals obscure the true cost of war and reduce oversight while funding DOD’s force modernization. For example, CSBA said the Army’s annual requirement of $13 billion for “reset,” or replacement of equipment lost in the conflicts, is drastically overstated, estimating the need at just $3 to 4 billion.  “Only a relatively small amount of (supplemental) funding has been used to replace equipment damaged or destroyed in those conflicts…most of this procurement funding has gone towards buying new current- and next-generation weapon systems, and upgrading existing weapons and other equipment,” the report says.

Finally, the Government Accounting Office released its quarterly summary of the Defense Department’s Cost of War Execution Reports, wherein DOD is supposed to inform Congress exactly how the money is being spent. Unfortunately, GAO “has found the data (in DOD’s reports) to be of questionable reliability.”  Just affirms our contention that the real issue bubbling beneath DOD’s dependence on supplementals is the Pentagon’s funhouse accounting.

DOD says it has integrated some war spending into its $584 billion budget request for FY 2010, but eliminating supplementals completely will take a while. In the meantime, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he plans to send an $80 billion supplemental funding request to the Hill this month to tide DOD over until Congresses passes next year’s budget –DOD’s highest ever. Just a little salt for our economic wounds.

Information obtained from Taxpayers for Common Sense.