John Spratt: “I want to suggest there are many things you ought to do and one of my biggest concerns is the way defense has been…”

“I want to suggest there are many things you ought to do and one of my biggest concerns is the way defense has been treated in this budget. When it left the House, we provided $70 billion more than the rate of inflation and gave the chairman of the committee the authority, I did not agree with this, but the authority willy-nilly to come back and plus that up by even more. You got to conference and took $30 billion of that away in order to get the discretionary spending number down. Let me tell you what my big concern is. Looking at this fairly complicated chart here, if you come to the bottom line, it is the line, the amount of money that remains after all the puts and takes in the conference agreement have been made. There is $12 billion in 2002, 19 in 2003, 24 in 2004; but we have read in recent weeks about the likely defense request that Mr. Rumsfeld is going to send once he figures out how to transform our military. And the numbers run 2, $300 billion, $25 billion a year. We have factored that into this budget. That is this line right here, defense increase. You know it is coming. I know it is coming. This budget explicitly anticipates it by giving the Committee on the Budget chairman the authority to adjust this number, however it takes. But what you have got is a thin bottom line here that will not sustain the kind of increase that Mr. Rumsfeld is talking about.”