Antiterror efforts get more money

Bush's plan stresses security
By Bryan Bender and Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | February 8, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The 2006 budget plan that President Bush submitted to Congress yesterday maintains or cuts funding across the federal government with one exception: spending related to the war on terrorism.

Under the plan, the Pentagon would get a 4.8 percent increase next year, to $419 billion, to help expand the Army and Marine Corps and add counterterror commandos. Domestic security spending, meanwhile, would rise 8.6 percent, to $49.9 billion, with new money for detention facilities to hold illegal migrants, radiation detection equipment, and FBI intelligence analysts.

The budget request does not include nearly $100 billion in spending being sought to fund the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. But Bush's new budget emphasizes the nation's ground forces, who have carried the load since the 2001 terrorist attacks, while reducing purchases of new aircraft, ships, and submarines.

"As a nation at war, an overriding priority must be to ensure that commanders have the troops and the equipment that they need to prevail in the global struggle against extremists," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday. "We know that the ground forces are stressed."

For New England, the new budget plan probably will mean job losses at shipyards in Bath, Maine, and in Groton, Conn. The Navy will buy one new destroyer and submarine per year instead of two, according to the plan.

The military budget request also calls for a 3.1 percent pay raise for military personnel and a 2.3 percent raise for Defense Department civilians. But it does not include an estimated $286 million needed to increase death benefits for military families who have lost relatives in Afghanistan or Iraq.

It provides $1.9 billion to fund a new round of base closures, expected to begin in May.

The budget will help expand the number of Army brigades from 33 to 43 by 2007 and restructure the Army National Guard. Rumsfeld estimated the active-duty Army would increase to 520,000 from about 500,000. The Marine Corps will add two infantry battalions, or about 2,500 troops, to its 175,000-strong force over the next three years.

The Pentagon also plans to add 1,200 military personnel and 200 civilians to the Special Operations Command, including creating four new Navy SEAL platoons.

On the home front, the Department of Homeland Security would be funded at $41.1 billion, a 7 percent increase. Nearly all its new revenue -- $2.2 billion of the $2.6 billion increase -- would come from hiking user fees levied on the public. Those include higher charges for visa applicants and a $3 rise in security surcharges for airline flights.

Senior homeland security officials pointed to a range of new spending on border protection and technology projects, notably a $176 million increase for activities related to the detention and repatriation of illegal aliens. Should Congress approve that request, it would be a 19 percent increase over the previous year.

But the request includes funds for only 210 additional border patrol agents, although the intelligence overhaul law, which Congress passed in December, authorized hiring 2,000 additional agents in 2006. That drew criticism from House Homeland Security Committee chairman Christopher Cox, Republican of California, who called it "wholly inadequate."

In the area of grants to local and state "first responders," which has pitted big cities against rural areas, the plan shifts more of the money toward high-risk urban areas while cutting total dollars by $420 million, to just under $3.6 billion.

The dollars that are evenly distributed among every state and for general firefighter and training programs would lose between 25 and 40 percent. But grants that are targeted to high-risk urban areas and critical infrastructure protection programs would increase by $462 million, a rise of about 39 percent.

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