Congress likely to OK request for war funding

So far, the Iraq war has cost California $40.6 billion.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
WASHINGTON -- Congress may huff and puff this week when it starts debating President Bush's latest request for money to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a $72.4 billion plan that will boost total spending on the conflicts to the range of $400 billion -- but quick and overwhelming approval is expected.
Still, Bush's use of an emergency budgeting technique that circumvents the normal budgeting and spending process has increasingly angered members of Congress and, critics say, is being used to hide costs of the fighting.
But some are trying to provoke more of a debate as Congress considers the latest in a growing series of special spending requests for military and reconstruction operations in the two countries. The National Priorities Project released a state-by-state, city-by-city breakdown of how much the Iraq fighting will cost if the new supplemental is approved intact.
Breakdown
The figures cite a $40.6 billion cost so far for California residents, for instance, including $1.1 billion for San Francisco and $404.1 million for Oakland.
The Republican-led House and Senate have made clear their unhappiness over the Bush administration's continued use of supplemental appropriations requests to fund the war in Afghanistan, which U.S. forces entered in late 2001 to oust the Taliban government and Al-Qaida, and in Iraq, which was invaded in March 2003. The White House sent the first emergency spending request a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Supplemental spending requests are usually designed for emergencies, such as recovery from natural disasters. In addition to its request for more war money, the White House has asked for $19.8 billion to pay for Hurricane Katrina storm recovery.
Pentagon budget
The Iraq-Afghanistan request is on top of Bush's plan for a $439 billion Pentagon budget for the coming fiscal year, a 7 percent increase from the current year. In addition to the $72.4 billion special spending request, Bush asked Congress in his proposed $2.8 trillion budget to set aside $50 billion more for Iraqi operations in the coming year.