Based on early press reports, I assumed that the Pentagon could reprogram money from the regular budget to the war for many months well into the new year.
Secretary Gates says that is not the case:
Well, I think that there is -- for two reasons, just speaking quite frankly. I think first, I think there is this misperception that now that we have a 2008 appropriations bill, that somehow we can shuffle the money around and find a way to get ourselves to April or May or some period of time. And what I'm just trying to say is I believe the appropriators understand that is not the case.
Those who are not involved in the appropriations process for Defense may not understand just how limited our ability to transfer funds around the department is -- the $3.7 billion that I talked about. And so they may not understand just how complicated and how -- the situation is, and also how restrictive.
To be honest, I think that there's probably also a sense that things like I talked about today is the Department of Defense crying wolf, that somehow we always figure out a way to make it work. Well, the way we always figure out a way to make it work is because the chiefs and the service secretaries have to jump through hoops to figure out ways to try and be prepared for a cutoff of funds. We come right up to the edge of the precipice. And then just like at the end of last May, we got the supplemental.
So we didn't have to do a lot of the dramatic things that we -- we did a lot of things and scared a lot of people who thought they were going to be furloughed and so on. I mean, we send a lot of signals to people as we try to get ready for these things. But you know, it's a little bit "The Perils of Pauline." And so far, at least in the last -- in my time here, we have gotten the relief from the Congress at the last minute, but it was at the last minute. And as I said before, we were working off of a $70 billion bridge fund last spring as well.
Just great. Our Defense Department really will have to hold a bake sale to buy bullets.
