Nearly half of the Pentagon’s fiscal 2017 budget request for wartime operations would reportedly go to “enduring requirements,” according to a report, prompting one expert to say the Defense Department “misled” Congress.
Inside Defense reported on Friday that about $30 billion of the $58.8 billion requested by the president for the fiscal 2017 overseas contingency operations account would go to long-term requirements, not the war-related costs for which the fund was originally established.
“The Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget request includes requirements associated with a forward presence and readiness that will likely continue after current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria conclude,” Lt. Col. Eric Badger, a Defense Department spokesman, told Inside Defense. “The cost associated with these enduring requirements is in the range of $30 billion annually.”
Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said this statement proves that the Pentagon “misled” Congress in its budget request, which said that only about $5 billion of the war chest was going to base budget needs.
The overseas account is not subject to mandatory spending caps, but the base budget is. In the past, base budget items have been shifted to the overseas account in order to stay under the caps, prompting critics to refer to the overseas account as a “slush fund.”
Pentagon leaders have said that putting base funding in the war chest makes it difficult to plan since it does not include future years funding.
