Funding to keep Guard troops on border left unsettled

The Pentagon will need $336 million in fiscal 2008 to keep thousands of National Guard troops deployed along the southwestern border through July, but the source for those funds remains in question less than two months before the start of the new fiscal year.

Neither the Defense Department nor the Homeland Security Department included money for the so-called Operation Jump Start in their fiscal 2008 budget requests, despite long-standing administration plans to reduce by half the 6,000 Guard troops on the border this summer and leave a residual force there until July 2008.

President Bush used a television address in May 2006 to announce an initial deployment of 6,000 Guard troops mainly for border surveillance missions and construction. Troops would be withdrawn after the first year "as new Border Patrol agents and new technologies come online," Bush said.

With troop reductions under way since July, the dearth in funding for the next phase of the mission will most likely leave Pentagon budget planners with the difficult task of shifting dollars within the department's accounts to pay for the mission, several congressional and defense sources familiar with the issue said.

A Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday the department "is committed to providing the required resources" to support the mission. "If necessary, the department will realign funds internally to cover these requirements," the spokesman added.

That money likely cannot come from the National Guard's accounts, which already are stretched thin to cover a significant equipment shortfall plaguing the heavily deployed force.

"I don't have any hide to take it out of," Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview this week. "I don't have any discretionary money that I have lying around to be able to reprogram," he added.

Blum, who has said publicly that the Guard needs $40 billion more over the next six years to buy equipment, has not been involved in budget discussions on Operation Jump Start.

The Army also has little wiggle room in its budget as it balances current wartime needs against long-term plans.

"Funding for the mission frankly is not my concern as long as I get it," Blum said. "Obviously the mission has to be funded. How it's funded or where the funds come from are really of no consequence for me as long as they come in a timely manner."

Sources said some Pentagon planners had hoped to use $224 million left over from this fiscal year to pay for the mission in fiscal 2008, but that funding expires Sept. 30 whether it is used or not. The administration received $708 million for the mission in fiscal 2006 supplemental dollars, and then reprogrammed $415 million last year from unobligated Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery money.

Several lawmakers tried unsuccessfully during recent debate on the fiscal 2008 Homeland Security spending bill to add $400 million for the mission. Among them, Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Pete Domenici, R-N.M., also proposed amending the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill to provide $400 million to continue the mission.

But their amendment was not considered before Democratic leaders shelved the bill last month. Senate leaders intend to bring up the annual defense authorization measure in September.