“…this is the first time in 13 years we will be presenting a budget to the Congress of the United States that's not a war-footing budget.” Those were the words of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on February 24th of this year. So we are having a hard time understanding why the Pentagon budget that was made public today still includes a separate fund for “Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO).”

OCO is the acronym-loving Pentagon’s way of referring to what used to be called wars. So why, if what Secretary Hagel said last week is true, do we have a section of the Pentagon budget devoting $79.4 billion to the wrap-up of the war in Afghanistan. Shouldn’t that money be back in the so-called “base” budget? After all, the largest part of that money goes to the Personnel and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) accounts.

The FY15 budget request, released March 4, 2014 requests an additional $79.4 billion, even as we draw down our forces even further in Afghanistan. For comparison, the FY14 Omnibus included $85.1 billion in OCO funding. Why do we continue to need such high levels of funding, when we plan to reduce to a bare-bones force in Afghanistan? And the six year plan for outyear funding is $29.9 billion every year through fiscal year 2021. So, even though we plan to be out of Afghanistan, the Administration plans on spending close to $30 billion a year for another 6 years, or more than $179 billion between now and calendar year 2022.

At Taxpayers for Common Sense, we think this makes no sense at all.