Follow us on social

Shutterstock_1101025283-scaled

Biden axes forever war 'slush fund' in victory for restrainers

While some say the money will just be shifted elsewhere, Congress and DOD will now be held accountable.

Reporting | Military Industrial Complex

The Biden administration has removed the overseas contingency operations fund from the Pentagon budget in a victory for pro-restraint activists.

For years, U.S. wars abroad have been funded through the OCO account, a “slush fund” worth tens of billion dollars per year that is not subject to the same oversight as the rest of the military budget. But in a reversal of years of U.S. military policy, the Biden administration’s first defense budget request will close the OCO account.

While the wars will still be financed through other parts of the defense budget, experts cautiously hailed the move as a step towards accountability and restraint.

Defense Priorities policy director Ben Friedman was skeptical of how much the move would accomplish.

The OCO account “has been this way that the Pentagon and its friends in Congress have gotten around the caps” under the Budget Control Act of 2011, which had set limits on the normal military budget until 2021, explained Friedman during a Thursday night discussion on the voice chat app Clubhouse..

Now that the budget caps are expiring, “it’s a little unclear what OCO was accomplishing for people anymore,” he said.

Forcing the military to fund its wars the normal way, however, adds a layer of much-needed accountability, according to Erica Fein, advocacy directory at Win Without War.

The use of “accounting gimmicks…enables the growth of the base budget, and it enables obscuring the cost of war,” she said during the same Clubhouse discussion. “It’s important to get these gimmicks off the books, regardless of whether they’ll be used in the same way.”

“It would have been better a few years ago, but it’s still a good thing today,” she added.

The OCO account had been created in 2001 to finance U.S. operations in Afghanistan, later growing as the “War on Terror” expanded to Iraq and beyond. The fund grew far beyond even its intended purposes as military leaders used it to plug up gaps in their budget they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to fill.

In the fiscal year 2020, the Pentagon had asked Congress for $165 billion in OCO funding. Only 15 percent of those funds was meant for missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

That year, the House Appropriations Committee reported that “the OCO experiment has been an abject failure and has given the [Department of Defense] a budgetary relief valve that has allowed it to avoid making difficult decisions.”

“OCO has become almost totally disconnected from its original purpose of supporting unanticipated, emergency, or difficult-to-plan costs for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as both Congress and the Department of Defense have used the funds to support base budget needs,” Mandy Smithberger, Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight, testified to the committee last month.

She hailed the Biden administration’s move in a Friday email to Responsible Statecraft.

“I think it's an important and overdue step to get rid of OCO. This shouldn't come at the cost of being transparent of what we're paying for our wars, but abuse of that fund has helped to contribute to endless and wasteful spending,” Smithberger wrote. “I just wish the Biden administration had extended the spirit of reform to reevaluating the entire Pentagon budget.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) similarly praised the move while criticizing the overall size of the budget.

“It is simply inexcusable to continue to shower weapons manufacturers with hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon waste,” she said in a statement. “While I support the elimination of the Overseas Contingency Fund—a slush fund used to further military engagement abroad—an increase of tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon spending, much of which will be spent on war, is simply inexcusable. ...We as a nation should be prioritizing peace and human rights over militarism,” Omar concluded.


Photo: Keith J Finks via shutterstock.com
Reporting | Military Industrial Complex
Havana, Cuba
Top Image Credit: Havana, Cuba, 2019. (CLWphoto/Shutterstock)

Trump lifted sanctions on Syria. Now do Cuba.

North America

President Trump’s new National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on Cuba, announced on June 30, reaffirms the policy of sanctions and hostility he articulated at the start of his first term in office. In fact, the new NSPM is almost identical to the old one.

The policy’s stated purpose is to “improve human rights, encourage the rule of law, foster free markets and free enterprise, and promote democracy” by restricting financial flows to the Cuban government. It reaffirms Trump’s support for the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which explicitly requires regime change — that Cuba become a multiparty democracy with a free market economy (among other conditions) before the U.S. embargo will be lifted.

keep readingShow less
SPD Germany Ukraine
Top Photo: Lars Klingbeil (l-r, SPD), Federal Minister of Finance, Vice-Chancellor and SPD Federal Chairman, and Bärbel Bas (SPD), Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs and SPD Party Chairwoman, bid farewell to the members of the previous Federal Cabinet Olaf Scholz (SPD), former Federal Chancellor, Nancy Faeser, Saskia Esken, SPD Federal Chairwoman, Karl Lauterbach, Svenja Schulze and Hubertus Heil at the SPD Federal Party Conference. At the party conference, the SPD intends to elect a new executive committee and initiate a program process. Kay Nietfeld/dpa via Reuters Connect

Does Germany’s ruling coalition have a peace problem?

Europe

Surfacing a long-dormant intra-party conflict, the Friedenskreise (peace circles) within the Social Democratic Party of Germany has published a “Manifesto on Securing Peace in Europe” in a stark challenge to the rearmament line taken by the SPD leaders governing in coalition with the conservative CDU-CSU under Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Although the Manifesto clearly does not have broad support in the SPD, the party’s leader, Deputy Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, won only 64% support from the June 28-29 party conference for his performance so far, a much weaker endorsement than anticipated. The views of the party’s peace camp may be part of the explanation.

keep readingShow less
Trump and Putin on phone
Top photo credit: Donald Trump (White House photo) and Vladimir Putin (Office of the Russian Federation President)
US-Russia talks: The rubber finally hits the road

Good, bad and ugly: Impact of US Iran strikes on Russia war talks

Europe

To a considerable degree, President Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 because voters embraced his message of keeping America out of protracted conflicts and his promise to end the war in Ukraine.

The administration has made substantial operational headway, particularly in reopening stable channels for dialogue with Russia, but it has proven difficult to arrive at a framework for a negotiated settlement that enjoys buy-in from all the stakeholders — Ukraine, Russia, and Europe.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.