Wednesday, February 17, 2016

A Look At The Pentagon's 'Slush Fund'

Wikipedia

US News and World Report: Inside the Pentagon’s ‘Slush Fund’


Obama’s inability to eliminate the “OCO” budget leaves war planners awash with unregulated money.

It’s been called war planners’ crack cocaine, a shifty accounting scheme or a habit-forming opiate imbibed government-wide. Barack Obama pledged to eliminate it at the beginning of his presidency, but its potency has only grown stronger since. Now, it accounts for the unregulated spending of $60 billion or more in taxpayer dollars per year, with no end in sight.

Get used to the Overseas Contingency Operations budget.

The OCO was known from 2001 to 2009 as “the supplemental” and is now considered a de facto slush fund. It began as the war budget President George W. Bush needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan without having to go back to Congress every time the Defense Department needed to modify its main half-trillion-dollar budget to account for changing battlefield conditions or the development of new technology.

Read more ....

WNU editor: $60 billion is a lot of "unregulated" money.

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