War Funding Bill: PAYGO Awry, Surtaxing Toward GI Benefits

Abstract:

The Congress is readying legislation to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threatening to load up the bill with unrelated related programs and initiatives. The "war supplemental" the House passed on May 15 failed to include funding for the war, but it did include an artificial timeline for troop withdrawal, codification of deployment schedules, billions of dollars in unrelated domestic spending, and the blocking of important cost-saving new Medicaid regulations.