The Black Budget: Bigger Than Head Start, the Justice Department, and the Park Service Combined

Pres­id­ent Obama rarely dis­cusses the na­tion’s vast sur­veil­lance and se­cur­ity ap­par­at­us by choice. He’d rather talk about lift­ing fam­il­ies out of poverty, pro­tect­ing the en­vir­on­ment, or mod­ern­iz­ing the na­tion’s crum­bling in­fra­struc­ture. But when it comes time to put a price tag on policy val­ues, it turns out that sur­veil­lance spend­ing dwarfs fund­ing for pro­grams that are more of­ten fea­tured in the pres­id­ent’s stump speeches.

Sur­veil­lance spend­ing is now more trans­par­ent be­cause of the “black budget,” a new leak from Ed­ward Snowden ana­lyzed by The Wash­ing­ton Post. As The Post writes, the $52.6 bil­lion budget

maps a bur­eau­crat­ic and op­er­a­tion­al land­scape that has nev­er been sub­ject to pub­lic scru­tiny. Al­though the gov­ern­ment has an­nu­ally re­leased its over­all level of in­tel­li­gence spend­ing since 2007, it has not di­vulged how it uses those funds or how it per­forms against the goals set by the pres­id­ent and Con­gress.

For the first time, we can really see ex­actly how this money is spent. Here’s the break­down of re­quests by pro­gram, ob­tained by The Post:

That comes to around $14.7 bil­lion for the CIA (which, The Post notes, is nearly 50 per­cent lar­ger than the budget for the Na­tion­al Se­cur­ity Agency), and is greatly above out­side es­tim­ates), $10.5 bil­lion for the Na­tion­al Re­con­nais­sance Pro­gram (largely to the Na­tion­al Re­con­nais­sance Of­fice, which runs spy satel­lites), and $11 bil­lion for the Con­sol­id­ated Crypto­lo­gic Pro­gram (which in­cludes the NSA).

Those budgets are all vast. But it’s when you com­pare them with oth­er pro­grams and agen­cies that the dif­fer­ences slip in­to or­ders of mag­nitude, par­tic­u­larly when com­pared with what the pres­id­ent is pro­pos­ing to spend on pro­grams his lib­er­al base cher­ishes:

The Black Budget Is…

1.6 times lar­ger than The Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health budget: Obama is ask­ing Con­gress for $31.3 bil­lion in 2014 for the Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment’s premi­er med­ic­al-re­search or­gan­iz­a­tion.

1.9 times lar­ger than the Justice De­part­ment’s budget: The Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion has pro­posed a fisc­al 2014 budget of $27.6 bil­lion for the Justice De­part­ment. Justice does, however, get a 6 per­cent taste of the black budget. Still, the 2013 CIA budget alone is equal to more than half of the de­part­ment’s total 2014 re­quest.

5 times lar­ger than the Head Start budget: Obama’s pro­posed 2014 budget for the Health and Hu­man Ser­vices De­part­ment re­quests $9.6 bil­lion for Head Start, an early-edu­ca­tion pro­gram aimed at in­fants and tod­dlers from low-in­come back­grounds.

6 times lar­ger than the budget for high-speed and oth­er pas­sen­ger-rail pro­grams: The Trans­port­a­tion De­part­ment’s 2014 re­quest in­cludes an av­er­age of $8 bil­lion per year over the next five years for freight, high-speed, and in­ter­city pas­sen­ger rail, part of the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s aim to give four of five Amer­ic­ans ac­cess to the na­tion’s high-speed rail net­work with­in 25 years.

20 times lar­ger than the Na­tion­al Park Ser­vice budget: The 2014 In­teri­or De­part­ment budget re­quest in­cludes $2.6 bil­lion for the Na­tion­al Park Ser­vice, the agency in charge of pro­tect­ing the na­tion’s 400-plus na­tion­al parks and man­aging 84 mil­lion acres of pub­lic land.

31 times lar­ger than the Se­cur­it­ies and Ex­change Com­mis­sion budget: Obama is ask­ing for $1.674 bil­lion for the SEC, an in­de­pend­ent board in charge en­for­cing many of the anti-fin­an­cial-fraud and — since 2010 — par­tially over­see­ing the reg­u­lat­ory over­haul man­dated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Re­form Law.

34 times lar­ger than the U.S. Fish and Wild­life Ser­vice budget: The 2014 In­teri­or re­quest in­cludes $1.55 bil­lion for the Fish and Wild­life Ser­vice, the agency tasked with pro­tect­ing most of the 1484 do­mest­ic spe­cies on the En­dangered Spe­cies List, as well as man­aging 500-plus Na­tion­al Wild­life Refuges.

106 times lar­ger than the Con­sumer Fin­an­cial Pro­tec­tion Bur­eau budget: The CFPB — the Eliza­beth War­ren-de­signed con­sumer watch­dog — says it plans to spend $497 mil­lion in 2014. The agency, which was born out of Dodd-Frank and charged with pro­tect­ing con­sumers from pred­at­ory lend­ing and oth­er threats, has been a polit­ic­al flash­point since it was cre­ated in 2010 and is a fre­quent fea­ture of Obama’s stump speeches on pro­tect­ing the middle class.

But there’s al­ways a big­ger fish…

But big though the “black budget” is, it can’t stack up to the gi­ants of fed­er­al spend­ing: en­ti­tle­ments and de­fense.

The Con­gres­sion­al Budget Of­fice pro­jects the U.S. will shell out more than $500 bil­lion to fund Medi­care in 2014, along with an­oth­er $300 bil­lion or so for Medi­caid.

The De­fense De­part­ment’s fisc­al 2013 base budget re­quest was for $525.4 bil­lion, and — due to con­tinu­ing budget res­ol­u­tions — the de­part­ment ended up net­ting $527.5 bil­lion. And that doesn’t in­clude fund­ing for Op­er­a­tion En­dur­ing Free­dom, which spent $86.5 bil­lion in FY 2013, mostly in Afgh­anistan.