Drawing on the experience of the global war on terror, defense hawks in the U.S. Congress have figured out an accounting gimmick to protect increases in military spending, according to an article published by The Hill on Tuesday.
After weeks of partisan debate, the United States avoided a default thanks to a deal that limits some federal spending in exchange for eliminating the debt ceiling for two years. Defense spending emerged largely unscathed, however, and is set to rise to nearly 900 billion U.S. dollars in fiscal year 2025.
“Specifically, there is bipartisan support in Congress to use emergency supplemental funding to circumvent the budget deal’s already extravagant ‘caps’ on defense spending,” noted the article.
“This would create a walled-off slush fund for Washington to move defense spending closer to and possibly over 1 trillion dollars without much political debate or strategic discipline,” it said.
Emergency supplemental funding would function similarly to the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, commonly known as OCO. During the global war on terror, the OCO fund was a malleable, seemingly bottomless supply of cash used to support U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, with minimal oversight, it added.
Critically, OCO money was considered separate from the Pentagon’s base budget and therefore not subject to spending limits, according to the article.
Policymakers discovered that they could escape the spending limits by moving defense budget items into the OCO account. “The OCO budget was an undemocratic tool that allowed Congress to fund wars that were not in America’s interest,” it said.
