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Slash and Burn:
More for Pentagon,
Less for Us

by Frida Berrigan

he tragic events of recent months have only esse McDaniel and other high school students at the Youth Opportunity Center in Portland, OR, probably thought their job training program was working pretty well. George W. Bush told them so himself.

On a West Coast jaunt in early January, Bush dropped in on the center, which provides job training to about 1,400 students in one of Portland’s poorest neighborhoods. He praised “the good instructors” there for “helping people help themselves.”

Yet a scant month later he revealed a proposed new budget slashing $545 million from job training programs around the country. For the Youth Opportunity Center, that’s likely to mean 80 percent cuts in funding—and maybe the end of the program. When Jesse McDaniel heard about the cuts, he thought of asking Bush, “How could you come visit here if you’re going to do that?”

Erika Weihs.

A Bush administration official defended the cuts, saying that the aim was to get rid of “duplicative services” and support proven programs like the Job Corps. But job-training programs such as the Youth Opportunity Center are only two years old, and program backers say it’s too soon to gauge their overall impact. The center’s executive director Antoinette Edwards says, “Given the time we’ve had, it feels as though we’re about to have the plug snatched out.”

It’s not just job training that Bush now seems to think “doesn’t work.” The White House budget proposes cuts at the Departments of Justice and Labor and appropriates no new money for the Departments of Commerce, Agriculture or the Interior. The budgets for education, the environment and space exploration are also essentially cut, as proposed increases do not reach the rate of inflation.

Jobs $0, ‘Defense’ $48 Billion More
Bush announced the new budget proposals February 5 from the Elgin Air Force Base in Florida. Clad in a leather bomber jacket and surrounded by the weapons of the “war on terrorism,” Bush was clearly trying to link the new budget to the fight against the “axis of evil.” He said he was asking for a $48 billion increase in military spending, the largest in almost two decades. If he has his way, total budget authority for military spending for FY2003—including military functions of the Coast Guard and the Department of Energy—will reach $396 billion, an $87 billion increase from when he took office in January 2001.

Standing against the backdrop of F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and an A-10 warthog, a huge U.S. flag and draped camouflage netting, Bush said, “Our men and women in uniform deserve the best weapons, the best equipment and the best training.” He made the argument that the United States needs new military spending to address new threats and a new security environment: “It is very clear that the defense budget is cheap when one compares it to putting our security at risk, our lives at risk, our country at risk, our freedoms at risk.”

But his rhetoric ignores the fact that this new military spending spree has little to do with fighting the war on terrorism. About one-third of the $68 billion allocated for weapons procurement in the new budget proposal will pay for Cold War systems with no relevance to the current war or future conflicts being imagined by war planners. The 70-ton Crusader artillery system, despite being designed to fight land battles against the Soviet Union, will be fully funded at $475.2 million. These and other Cold War relics are slated to receive $21.2 billion in the FY 2003 budget, including an additional $12 billion to fund three new fighter plane programs, the Joint Strike Fighter, F-22 and Super Hornet. A year and a few months ago, on the campaign trail, Bush repeatedly said that the United States could not afford and did not need all three systems. Comparing the U.S. military budget to what other countries spend, the Bush administration’s proposed increase alone is larger than the entire military budget of every other country in the world except our Cold War rival Russia. (Russia spends about $56 billion on the military each year.)

Bush’s new budget is a four-volume tome printed on heavy glossy paper. The cover is a picture of the American flag, and the pages are full of photographs and charts. In the language of the private sector, clearly drafted before the Enron scandal hit the front page, the budget calls on government to emulate the efficiency of private sector, saying, “Dollars will go to programs that work, [and] those programs that don’t work will be reformed.”

But what works and what does not work can depend on where you’re sitting. Each government agency received a report card from the Budget Office, grading areas of work with red, yellow or green dots. Only the National Sciences Foundation received the best possible grade: all green. The Defense Department (and many other agencies) got red across the board.

Yet the Pentagon wants even more money. The ink was barely dry on the White House budget proposal when the Pentagon began making its case that $48 billion is not enough. General Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressed Congress the next day to call for spending of more than $100 billion a year “for several years.”

Can we afford that?

Frida Berrigan is a Research Associate at the World Policy Institute and a member of WRL’s Executive Committee.