Defense Budget Bureaucratic Politics

Nick Schwellenbach

From behind the CQ firewall, a report last week by Josh Rogin: "the Pentagon and the Office of Management and Budget have agreed to set the limit for fiscal 2010 Defense spending at $537 billion, according to multiple sources close to the discussions."

Secretary Robert Gates has repeatedly mentioned the need for hard choices and has suggested that some major weapons systems may even get cut.  But there's more than meets the eye over the looming battle over the defense budget.  As if it wasn't hard enough to settle what really is a national security priority, "framing" and a complex set of bureaucratic politics, greased by selective leaking, seems to be driving some of this decision.

Rogin goes on to report:

The compromise deal also settles, at least temporarily, the first public rift between Gates' Pentagon staff and the new Office of Management and Budget staff, which centered around whether to portray Obama's first Pentagon budget request as a cut or increase in Defense spending.

Pentagon officials and conservative Defense experts have been attempting to portray OMB's guidance as a "cut" in Defense spending by comparing it to a draft budget request compiled last fall by the Joint Chiefs of Staff which called for $584 billion.

The Pentagon never publicly released that document, but former Defense officials and Defense budget experts have called it an unrealistic wish list that was meant to pressure Obama to drastically increase Defense spending or be forced to defend a reluctance to do so.