Unveiled yesterday, the $2.13 trillion budget
President Bush proposed for fiscal 2003 has two particularly striking features.
The first is that this is clearly a national-security budget. The second is that
the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has introduced the welcome
concepts of management and accountability into the federal budget
process.
On the national-security front, 2003
budget authority for the Department of Defense would increase by $45 billion, or
13.5 percent, to $379 billion. It represents the largest percentage increase
since Ronald Reagan began reinvigorating America's armed forces in the early
1980s. Defense spending for 2007 is projected to total $451 billion. Large
though these figures appear to be, defense spending during the next five years
would still average only 3.4 percent of total economic output. In other words,
Mr. Bush's national defense budget is clearly affordable.
Total spending for homeland security will
increase next year to $38 billion, representing a virtual doubling of the
pre-September 11 level. Federal funding for "first responders" — firefighters,
rescue squads, emergency medical personnel and other local workers who are the
first to arrive at "ground zero" — will increase twelvefold next year to $3.5
billion. Nearly $6 billion, or more than four times current spending, would fund
improvements in the nation's public health care system in response to the
increased threat of bioterrorism.
If national
defense and homeland security are budget priorities, other programs are hardly
ignored. Non-national-security spending would increase between 2 percent and 3
percent at a time when the consumer price index and other inflation gauges have
been running significantly below 2 percent a year. Over 10 years, the budget
would allocate nearly $200 billion to reform Medicare, including providing a
prescription drug benefit for the elderly.
On
the management front, OMB has introduced the audacious concept of accountability
and performance measurement. This year's budget incorporates the President's
Management Agenda, which aims to reform federal management and improve
governmental performance through the introduction of five government-wide
initiatives. These initiatives measure how well agencies and departments
maximize the talent of their human capital; take advantage of competitive
sourcing; improve financial performance; exploit the benefits of Internet-based
technology; and integrate budget expenditures and performance. Employing a
simple "traffic light" grading system (green for success, yellow for mixed
results and red for unsatisfactory), OMB assessed how each federal department
and agency performed in each of the five initiatives. Perhaps the most
eye-popping pages of the slick, color-filled budget document were pages 49-50,
which summarized the results of the Executive Branch Management Scorecard. Of
the 130 traffic-light signals for the 26 agencies and departments, a stunning
110 were glaring red circles, including the five categories for OMB
itself.
In its effort to achieve budgetary
accountability, OMB did not assess the White House's performance. So, here is a
simple standard: Having submitted a reasonable budget for 2003, Mr. Bush should
be graded by how often he uses his veto pen and how well he exploits his
astronomical political capital to enforce his spending blueprint.
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020205-8724490.htm
THE END
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