Kosiak To Oversee Defense Budgeting at OMB
By JOHN T. BENNETT
Published: 27 Jan 12:51 EST (17:51 GMT)
President Barack Obama is expected to tap Steven Kosiak, a prominent U.S. military budget analyst, to oversee defense spending matters at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Steve Kosiak will leave his job as vice president for budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments to become the OMB director for defense and international affairs. (AFP)
Kosiak will leave his job as vice president for budget studies at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments to become OMB's director for defense and international affairs.
He will take over that post at a time when the Obama administration will be tasked with making "tough decisions" on defense budget matters, as Robert Gates, the defense secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee Jan. 27.
One of those decisions will be how to proceed with supplemental spending measures, which the Bush administration used to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under Bush, however, the services were allowed to pack the emergency spending bills with items many defense experts and lawmakers said should have been paid for using annual Pentagon budgets.
As recently as mid-December, Kosiak was critical of the previous administration's repeated use of supplementals.
"The failure to include estimates of the costs of these military operations in the administration's annual projections of federal spending means that those projections substantially understate likely future funding requirements," he wrote in a December report. "In turn, this may lead the administration and Congress to enact spending increases in other areas or tax cuts that it would not consider if, more realistically, its projections of federal spending requirements included an estimate of war costs."
Kosiak, who has written numerous studies about defense spending issues, came to CSBA after a stint with another Washington-based think tank, the Center for Defense Information. He has worked on Capitol Hill and in the office of the U.S. Mission to NATO.
He also has recently taught in the Security Studies program at Georgetown University.
At the time of this posting, Kosiak had yet to respond to a message seeking comment.
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