Funding for Defense, Veterans Affairs scheduled for increase in 2010

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments would receive healthy funding increases in the Obama administration's 2010 budget proposal, according to information released by the White House Office of Management and Budget on Thursday.

Detailed spending information won't be available until April while the White House and department officials work out funding for specific programs, but a 142-page summary of the administration's first budget request provides a glimpse of their priorities.

The White House is requesting $533.7 billion for Defense in 2010, a 4 percent increase over baseline funding in 2009. Additionally, the White House is asking for $75.5 billion for the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year and $130 billion in supplemental appropriations to cover war costs in 2010.

In submitting the supplemental funding request with the baseline budget, the Obama administration is breaking with the Bush administration's widely criticized practice of excluding those war-funding requests from the typical budget process.

"We're trying to be much more upfront and transparent in our budget request, which I think is important not just for visibility purposes but for discipline and planning for the long term," said a senior OMB official, who briefed reporters on background on Thursday. When the White House sends its detailed 2010 budget request to Congress in April, it will include a similar level of detail for the supplemental war-related costs, and the entire spending package will be subject to congressional scrutiny through the normal appropriations process, he said.

In addition to including supplemental war costs in its budget request, the White House also has established strict criteria for Pentagon officials about which costs could be considered war-related. In the past, the services have included some weapons modernization programs in their supplemental funding requests, but that practice will no longer be acceptable, the OMB official said.

While the 2010 baseline budget request represents a fairly significant funding increase, especially in the current fiscal climate, it's not clear that there will be enough money to fund weapons programs now under development, many of which are currently over budget and behind schedule.

Details on weapons programs will not be made available until April, but the budget summary noted, "The administration will set realistic requirements and stick to them and incorporate 'best practices' by not allowing programs to proceed from one stage of the acquisition cycle to the next until they have achieved the maturity to clearly lower the risk of cost growth and schedule slippage."

Weapons programs could face an uncertain future, but the outlook for troops is more clear. The budget would allow the Army to expand to 547,000 troops and the Marine Corps to 202,000 troops by the end of 2009 to reduce stress on service members and their families. The budget also would fund a 2.9 percent pay raise for men and women in uniform and allow severely wounded troops who are medically retired from service to collect their full military pensions as well as disability benefits from VA.

The White House estimated this increase in benefits will help about 123,000 severely-injured veterans whose retirement pay is now offset by benefits they receive from VA.

The 2010 budget request "is very much a good news story" for veterans, said the OMB official. VA would receive $113 billion in 2010, an 11 percent increase from 2009. The funding boost would improve health care programs and expand coverage to more than 500,000 veterans by 2013, according to the official.

"We fully fund [information technology] and other areas necessary to implement the department's plans," the official said.