Pentagon Worried About Spending Cuts

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As the economy collapses around our heads, the federal government is preparing financial bailout packages totaling an estimated $2 trillion–and that, perhaps, just to start. There’s a lot of money going out the door, but one potential loser could be the Pentagon, reports UPI. A notoriously profligate spender (read this), the Defense Department, according to the Congressional Budget Office, accounts for more than half of all federal discretionary spending and about 4.5 percent of GDP. And despite what you may think, the Pentagon’s budget has not declined since the end of the Cold War; it’s now 20 percent greater, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 1985 when President Reagan was spending the Soviets into the ground.

In short, the Pentagon is flush with cash, but could the glory days of almost limitless spending be winding down? Defense Secretary Robert Gates seems to think so. “The spigot of defense spending that opened on Sept. 11 is closing,” he said at a Senate hearing last month. But the reality of a leaner fiscal climate comes at a bad time for the military services, which are straining to maintain readiness while fighting a two-front war. There’s equipment to refurbish or replace, soaring personnel costs, and next-generation weapons to develop.The latter accounts for much of the Pentagon’s bloat. Big-ticket weapons systems are an ever-growing drain on the budget, and the military services have shown little, if any, restraint in approaching Congress for additional funds when their pet projects have gone over budget, often many times over the original cost estimates. The biggest offenders are the Air Force’s F-22 and F-35 fighters, the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer, and the Army’s Future Combat Systems program. On average, between 2000 and 2007, says the CBO, the difference between initial cost estimates and the actual price tag upon delivery rose from 6 percent to 27 percent. And systems were, as a rule, delivered 21 months later than expected.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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