Federal Budget Discussion

Two Sunday columns in The Washington Post say a lot about the coming federal budget battle. George Will comments on Republican rhetoric about the deficit while the GOP largely leaves defense spending untouched. To their credit, several GOP figures rightly criticize the Pentagon's opaque budget offerings.

Tall, affable Buck McKeon sits, gavel in hand, at the turbulent intersection of two conflicting Republican tendencies. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee embodies the party's support for a "strong" defense, which is sometimes measured simply by the size of the Pentagon's budget.

After listening to recent Defense Department testimony, Randy Forbes, a six-term Virginia Republican on McKeon's committee, was exasperated. He said that for four years the department, whose $708 billion budget - his number - is the size of the world's 22nd-largest economy (the Netherlands), has not complied with the law requiring auditable financial statements. And he charged that "none" of the budget is "even in a position to be audited." He said that the department is not "qualified" to talk about efficiencies if it "does not know where our defense dollars are going" and that it cannot comply with the law if it "does not even have mechanisms in place to perform the audits."

E.J. Dionne makes a similar point.

House GOP members are fixated not on specific programs or the purposes of government but on how big an arbitrary number measuring their budget cuts should be. The leadership offered an absurdly long list of cuts in the very narrow part of the domestic budget.

Here we have both a conservative (Will) and liberal (Dionne) pointing out that the Democrats, led by the Obama administration, are focused on specific programs in their budget proposals while the Republicans (with come exceptions) are locked in on overall numbers that ignore the specifics. This lends more support to conservative blogger David Frum's observation that Democrats are interested in governing while Republicans are interested in politics.

--Ballard Burgher