Editorial: Accounting chicanery

Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2005 | 9:07 a.m.

Unknown to members of Congress in late 2003 as they passed President Bush's plan to create a prescription drug benefit for seniors, the White House had withheld from them reliable estimates for the program's costs. Many fiscally conservative Republicans in Congress had said they wouldn't support any Medicare drug benefit costing more than $400 billion over 10 years, so the Bush administration misled members of Congress in order to secure enough votes to pass legislation deemed critical for the president's re-election bid. The Bush administration did this by preventing Medicare's chief actuary from telling Congress that the program would actually cost from $500 billion to $600 billion -- not $400 billion as advertised by Bush.

Accounting dishonesty by the Bush administration also has occurred elsewhere, as the White House has refused to include in its routine budget requests the actual costs to fund the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, for example, the White House was able to get Congress to approve $87 billion (and another $25 billion this year) for the war efforts in separate supplemental budget requests. It was a maneuver that prevented these war costs from appearing on the regular budget's ledger, thereby masking the true shortfall in the deficit. Maybe it's because such accounting chicanery has become so prevalent that on Sunday The New York Times buried on Page 14 the news that the Bush administration is relying on more sleight-of-hand to make it appear that the president will be able to honor his campaign pledge of cutting the federal budget deficit in half over th e next five years.

To make it easier to achieve this goal, White House budget analysts are going to ignore that the deficit this past year was actually $413 billion. Instead, they're going to going to claim it was $521 billion, which is what the White House a year ago had projected it would be. This, then, makes it seem as if the White House already has shaved more than $100 billion from the deficit, even though it's pure fiction. And, the Times reports, once the five-year plan is unveiled next month, excluded from it will be the ongoing costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (about $80 billion) and any costs to partially privatize Social Security, which could require $2 trillion in borrowing by the government over the next 10 years to create private investment accounts.

Bush, to put it simply, hasn't leveled with the American people when it comes to something as basic as budgeting. Misleading the public about how much it truly costs to run government is a failure of leadership -- and one that will haunt future generations that ultimately will have to pick up the tab.