Desperate for Money

The Air Force and the rest of government face budget woes.

"Desperate for Money" is the headline we chose for our feature in this issue about the Air Force, whose leaders have been pleading for an extra $20 billion a year. It's an appropriate characterization, too, of the rest of government, caught as it is once again in a prolonged fight over funding for its agencies and programs.

The lamentable budget situation just gets worse. Here we are, after most agencies had to make do with a continuing resolution for a full year, stuck in another morass. President Bush has been attacking Congress for its failure to send him even a single appropriations bill by the end of October, a failure caused in part by his threats to wield his veto pen. This is a 2 percent tussle-Bush objects to the Democrats' $23 billion increase in his $933 billion budget for fiscal 2008 discretionary spending.

So members of Congress could be here until Christmas and still fail to produce the kind of carefully crafted bills that are its principal responsibility. Bush seems to be spoiling for a political battle. "You're fixing to see what they call a fiscal showdown in Washington," he said on Oct. 15.

Another yearlong continuing resolution to fund agencies at current levels or a last-minute all-or-nothing omnibus bill likely will result from the impasse, although the fight also could produce a government shutdown like the one 12 years ago. So, federal officials once again are faced with difficulty and stress in planning and managing agency operations.

Bush and Congress, disgracefully derelict in their annual appropriations duties and wholly neglectful of the nation's long-term fiscal problems, deserve to be languishing in the brig of public opinion as, indeed, they are.

Not so for the leaders of our military services, who deservedly rank higher in opinion polls. But they have their own budget woes, some of their own making. Each of the four service chiefs of staff has told me this year that we should be devoting more of our nation's wealth to the military. The case is made most arrestingly, perhaps, by the Air Force, whose chief, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, joined me on stage at the Willard Hotel for 90 minutes on Oct. 30. We tell his story of ancient aircraft and diminishing capability-and remark on the unusual public confrontation he and Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne are having with the White House over budget issues.

Two stories in this issue explore vexing immigration problems. One, highlighted on our cover, delves into the Homeland Security Department's US VISIT program, the high-tech system installed at border crossings to check the status of people coming into this country. So far it's been a model public-private partnership, as Accenture Ltd. has delivered an effective system on time and under budget. But the system won't be complete until it also can check on people leaving the country, so government can identify the many thousands who overstay their visas. And that, reports Zack Phillips, is turning out to be an exceedingly difficult task.

Government, meanwhile, is having trouble enforcing policies that could slow illegal immigration, reports Katherine McIntire Peters, in a compelling exploration of our nation's deep divisions on the immigration question.