Word: budgeter
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...weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates trooped up to Capitol Hill to answer questions about the new Pentagon budget. This is an unseemly spectacle under the best of circumstances. Even reasonable members of Congress have been known to empretzel themselves shamelessly, attempting to defend weapons the Pentagon doesn't want or need, but which provide jobs for their constituents. Usually, they win, too. It is just too difficult for a Secretary of Defense to argue against shiny new weapons systems with subcontractors in 46 states, even if they are fantastically over budget and designed to counter a missile threat...
...Undaunted, the legislators pressed their case - especially the Republicans, who seemed convinced, as one said, that the Pentagon budget was part of a nefarious Obama Administration plot: "Fiscal restraint for defense and fiscal largesse for everything else." Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona was very concerned about anti-missile defense - a gold-plated pipe dream, if there ever was one - and especially a product dramatically called the Kinetic Energy Interceptor. To which Gates replied, in a manner so casually dismissive that Franks seemed to shrivel in his seat, "I would just say that the security of the American people...
...that, according to the Secretary of Defense, is the rationale for his new Pentagon budget; Bush had funded his wars outside the usual budget process, via so-called supplemental appropriations. Gates has included the war funding in his base budget, "so the programs will be institutionalized and the various services will fight for them." He insists that he is not abandoning the fancy hardware and future gizmos that his predecessors and Congress loved. "The things we've cut," he told me, "wouldn't have been in the budget even if we had $50 billion more to spend. They were programs...
...negotiating over the budget is likely to turn brutal, although Obama aides insist the President will veto the budget if Gates isn't satisfied with the result. And then there are the wars - especially Afghanistan, which Gates has said he hopes will turn around in the next year, but which has obviously become a more difficult enterprise than anticipated. Gates originally had planned to retire after a year or so, but he seems to have settled in, found a level of comfort and influence with the Obama Democrats that he never quite expected. "I don't do maintenance," Gates told...
...expanded to include working with top administrators struggling to close budgetary gaps and slash expenses at the schools, in addition to meeting with Faust on an almost-daily basis. During interviews in the past few months, many administrators called his contributions “critical” to the budget-cutting process...