Washington – Hoping to speed approval of war funds, House-Senate negotiators were to meet this evening on legislation to pay for the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and for hurricane relief along the Gulf Coast.
After missing a Memorial Day deadline, negotiators hope to seal agreement this week. The White House says a money crunch is threatening military operations and training accounts, and the Army in particular says it is being forced already to curtail some services and shift money to maintain its war operations.
“The longer that the U.S. Congress delays, the more we get into doing the kinds of things that may fall into the category of stupid,” Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army’s budget chief, said Monday evening.
Sinn said the Army would be unable to meet its payroll in mid-July if the extra war funds are not provided soon. Also, the Army, by June 16, would have to lay off 12,500 temporary civilian workers hired to help in the global war on terrorism and in an Army-wide program to reorganize brigades, he said.
“So we don’t have much time as the clock continues to tick,” Sinn said.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Army has cut spending on spare parts, transportation and official travel.
“It’s imperative that Congress finish its work and get this to the president to sign,” Whitman said. “This supplemental went up in February. It’s now June.”
House Appropriations Committee chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and his Senate counterpart, Thad Cochran, R-Miss., are leading the talks and have agreed to live within a White House demand that the emergency funding bill be limited to $92.2 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and hurricanes – plus $2.3 billion to combat bird flu.
Meanwhile, a conservative group announced an ad campaign in three states aimed at pressuring senators to drop several controversial home- state projects from the bill. Top among the targets of Americans for Prosperity is a $700 million Senate plan to pay CSX Transportation to abandon a recently repaired freight rail line to Mississippi so that the right of way could be used for a new east-west highway.
