By Tom Philpott
Military Update focuses on issues affecting pay, benefits and lifestyle of active and retired servicepeople. Its author, Tom Philpott, is a Virginia-based syndicated columnist and freelance writer. He has covered military issues for almost 25 years, including six years as editor of Navy Times. For 17 years he worked as a writer and senior editor for Army Times Publishing Co. Philpott, 49, enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1973 and served as an information officer from 1974-77.
Is the Bush team leveling with military people over spending plans for pay raises and health care, or is that smoke blowing across the parade field?
Service and congressional sources say troops are getting some "spin’’ that would be more appropriate to a presidential campaign than a heart-to-heart with their new commander in chief.
Consider the planned pay raise for next January. During the campaign, Bush pledged to add an extra $1 billion to military pay. On Feb. 12, in a speech to soldiers at Fort Stewart, Ga., Bush talked about adding $1.4 billion.
Soldiers cheered, of course, but the figure is less impressive than it sounds, say service and Capitol Hill sources, as it now seems likely the money will come from other Defense programs.
First, let’s review that added $400 million. Sounds magnanimous, but the law requires it.
The Clinton administration left behind a budget for fiscal 2002 that had a 3.7 percent military pay raise penciled in for next January. That is nearly a full percentage point below what a 1999 law directs.
Congress said annual military raises, through 2005, should be set a half percentage point above wage growth in the private sector, to narrow a "pay gap’’ with the private sector. To comply with that law, Bush needed to raise Clinton’s projected raise to 4.6 percent, which will cost — you guessed it — $400 million.
Bush signaled he will properly pay for the raise, but it’s not really an "extra’’ $400 million.
What about his pledge to add $1 billion to pay? That’s real, Pentagon officials said. If the money is applied "across-the-board’’ next January, every pay grade, active and reserves, will get 2.2 percent on top of 4.6 percent, or a raise of 6.8 percent.
What has surprised service leaders is Bush administration guidance that it won’t cover that added $1.4 billion for pay by raising the defense budget’s top line. Instead, the services have been told to take the money "out of hide,’’ that is, find it in other programs.
Whether the maneuver is wise or foolish depends on one’s perspective. The services will say they already had important plans for that money. But to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is playing a dominant role shaping the top line of Bush’s first defense budget, shifting funds from other accounts into pay is a routine budget tradeoff, a balancing of priorities.
Bush will keep his promise of adding $1 billion to pay. He just won’t raise the budget’s top line to do it.
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