by Maital Dahan
After five years in Afghanistan and four years in Iraq, tens of billions of dollars for the War on Terror are still provided outside the normal budgetary process, through a giant loophole known as emergency spending. The House version of the fiscal 2007 supplemental, the “U.S. Readiness, Veterans’ Health and Iraq Accountability Act, 2007,” H.R. 1591, is a blatant betrayal of the Democrats’ campaign promise to restore fiscal responsibility to Congress.
President Bush requested $103 billion in emergency spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and disaster relief. On March 23, the House of Representatives voted 218-212 to pass H.R. 1591, which includes an additional $21 billion in unrelated domestic spending. The extraneous items include $400 million for rural schools, $283 million for the Milk Income Loss Contract program, $74 million for peanut storage costs, and $25 million for spinach growers.