The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has estimated in a new report that the overall cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001 will top $500 billion next year (the fiscal year ends September 30). The latest addition to this spending, of course, was the $69 billion allocated in the supplemental spending bill signed into law earlier this month.

The report states that even assuming the number of troops needed in the war will be brought down to 74,000 by 2010, war costs between FY07 and FY16 could total another $371 billion. Regardless of your views on the necessity of this war, this spending has simple grown too high (long ago) to be considered "emergency" anymore. If this President and Congress are going to continue spending on war efforts for years to come, they need to budget these costs along with the rest of the appropriations, not bypass the budget system time and again to request tens of billions of dollars. Doing so only rids the process of the necessary oversight and debate that should be in place when it comes to appropriating hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars toward a single effort.

Does welfare reform work? Do food stamps really feed the needy? Are government assistance programs really helping those in need? How effective is our social safety net?

Congress certainly doesn’t want to know. Right now, the House Appropriations Committee is considering a Bush recommendation to terminate a program designed to answer these questions.

In 1984 the Census Bureau initiated the Survey of Income and Program Participation, or SIPP. SIPP’s purpose is to “collect source and amount of income, labor force information, program participation and eligibility data, and general demographic characteristics to measure the effectiveness of existing federal, state, and local programs.” It is an invaluable tool used to determine how well (or how poorly) government assistance programs deliver on their promises.

Good governance requires good information, and since Congress isn’t interested in the former, one can conclude it’s not interested in the latter. Researchers seeking to understand low-income families and the programs designed to help them have very few places to turn when they look for data, and SIPP is unique in its depth, scope, and quality of data. In other words, it is THE place researchers (inside and outside the government) go to when they look for basic (and more complex) information about government assistance programs.

At $32 million per year, SIPP is a veritable bargain because of the quality and amount of information it supplies to policymakers. The existing FY2007 Science-State-Justice-Commerce Appropriations bill calls for just enough funds to wrap-up data collection for this year, effectively ending the program. However, Rep. José Serrano (D-NY) is proposing to add $10 million to keep the program in existence. It isn’t full funding, but it’s enough to ensure that the program continues.

UPDATE: Rep. Serrano was successful!

What exactly does performance mean? How would the administration actually assess performance? We have some clues with the shoddy work they've been doing on assessing the performance of programs with the Program Assessment Rating Tool. OMB Watch just testified today about some of those problems -- check it out.

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:33:20 PM



Hearing on PART This Afternoon

OMB Watch's own Director of Federal Fiscal Policy, Adam Hughes, will be testifying this afternoon in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security. The hearing is looking at the PART (Program Assessment Rating Tool) and how systematic performance reporting of government agencies helps taxpayers get better services as well as whether Congress can better utilize the report cards to inform their annual budgeting.

You can read his full testimony on the OMB Watch website.