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 WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Wednesday he'll submit a proposal to balance the budget in five years and exhorted Congress to "end the dead of night process" of quietly tucking expensive pet projects into spending bills.
The president's spokesman, meanwhile, said Bush would talk in his Jan. 23 State of the Union address about making spending on the Iraq war "as transparent as possible."
Lawmakers and the independent, bipartisan Iraq Study Group have criticized the Bush administration for funding the war through emergency supplemental bills, instead of including the costs in the administration's yearly formal budget request for running the government. That means the full cost of the war is not included in the administration's deficit calculations, and are not subject to overall spending caps.
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