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Washington Post:
Conservatives Dispute GOP Budget Claims
Figures Cited Are for Authorized Spending, Not Actual Outlays, Say Critics
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 26, 2003; Page A06
After three straight years of double-digit increases in federal spending, President Bush and the Republican Congress say they have the situation under control. But a number of conservatives say actual spending this year will be triple the figures cited by the White House.
The two camps have simply chosen different kinds of budget numbers to bolster their positions. Bush enumerates the amount of spending that Congress authorizes each year. His critics cite the actual amount the government is spending. In effect, the president and his allies are counting the money put into the spending pipeline, while the others count the amount flowing out the other side, some of which may have been slowly trickling through for years.
The debate over federal spending has become politically charged, with both sides tossing out wildly divergent numbers. On Dec. 15, Bush said at a news conference that his administration and the GOP-controlled Congress had held spending not related to the military or homeland security to a 6 percent increase in fiscal year 2002, with a 5 percent increase last fiscal year and a 3 percent increase for the 2004 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
"We're working with Congress to hold the line on spending," Bush said.
Tad DeHaven, a budget researcher at the libertarian Cato Institute, published his version of the numbers a few days later.
He found a 6.8 percent increase in the same categories in 2002, an 8.3 percent increase last fiscal year and a 6.3 percent increase this year -- more than double Bush's 2004 number.
The president's figures "amount to a spin job," DeHaven said on the Web site of the conservative National Review. "Many people who support the president's tax cuts and his conduct of the war can no longer stomach his expansion of big government via big spending," he wrote.
Congressional Republicans say they will hold overall discretionary spending this year to a 3 percent increase, with military spending rising 1.2 percent.
Brian M. Riedl, a federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, put the spending increase this year at triple the GOP's overall level, or 9 percent. By his reckoning, the rate of growth in defense spending will be nearly 10 times that of the congressional estimate.
Wall Street also is raising doubts about the White House's budget optimism.
Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo & Co. and a noted economic optimist, warned clients that week, "The budget deficit could lead to sharply higher inflation, rising interest rates and a falling dollar unless measures are taken to restrain them."
In fact, both the optimists and the pessimists may be correct, budget experts say. The difference is whether they are counting budget authority, which is the spending authorized by Congress each year, or outlays, the funds actually shelled out by the government. Federal budget authority climbed 11 percent in 2002 and 15.3 percent in 2003, but if Congress and Bush refrain from enacting additional emergency spending bills over the next nine months, budget authority this fiscal year will rise only 3.1 percent, said the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan scorekeeper.
Actual spending, however, shows little sign of abatement. Outlays rose 13.2 percent in fiscal 2002, 15.2 percent in 2003 and 8.9 percent in 2004 -- an average growth rate of 12.4 percent.
The problem is that Congress can authorize spending levels, but lawmakers have little control over how fast the government writes the checks, budget analysts say. In 2002, for instance, Congress approved a 26 percent increase in military spending for the next fiscal year. But actual defense spending climbed 20.5 percent. With so much money still in the pipeline, lawmakers approved virtually no defense spending increase for this year, knowing that actual military spending is expected to climb 10.1 percent.
J.T. Young, a spokesman for the White House budget office, likened the debate to a holiday shopping trip. If a shopper spends a total of $500 one day using four credit cards, should he tell his wife he spent $500 when he comes home, or should he tell her about each bill as he writes the checks to the credit card companies?
"Serious budget people want to count budgeting decisions," Young said. "If you want to count decisions, you count [budget authority]. If you count outlays, you're just counting disbursements."
Riedl and other critics generally agree, but, they say,
Republicans in Washington -- anxious about the unhappiness of their conservative supporters -- are manipulating the authorizing numbers, making them all but irrelevant. Authorized spending rose 15.3 percent in 2003 in large part because of a $79 billion emergency "supplemental" spending bill passed shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Riedl said. But only half of that money was spent last year, allowing Congress to rein in authorized spending levels this year.
"It was probably unnecessary to go that high in 2003 budget authority," Riedl said, "but the White House understands that if they threw a lot into the supplemental, they would relieve pressure on their 2004 budget."
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