Emergency Spending Gives Senators Flexibility On Defense.

This article reports that budget watchers have said that the U.S. Senate appropriators freed up large sums of money by transferring programs from the traditional budget to the $50 billion wartime emergency account. It was found that the U.S. Senate appropriators made sizeable cuts in some of the Pentagon's priciest programs to help generate $7 billion in savings in the FY06 Defense spending bill. Keith Ashdown at the organization Taxpayers for Common Sense, who found $12.2 billion in earmarks in the FY05 Defense bill, predicts the funding for pet projects will continue despite the Pentagon's need to pay for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.