BUSH SEEKS EXTRA $27.4 BILLION, WITH MORE THAN HALF FOR WAR

WASHINGTON - President Bush sent Congress an ambitious $27.4 billion
package of new budget requests that combines new spending for the war
on terrorism with election-year aid for dislocated workers at home.

Less than 1% of the total is offset by savings elsewhere, and if fully
enacted, the proposal would raise total discretionary appropriations
to $737 billion -- $73 billion more than last year and $153 billion
above fiscal 2000.

But beyond the numbers, the detailed package represents an
extraordinary glimpse into the different facets of the war, funding
everything from 5,000 new hemostatic battlefield dressings to a
National Science Foundation scholarship program to train a new
generation of experts in cybersecurity. From Nepal to Djibouti and
Yemen, dozens of overseas governments are promised aid in return for
cooperation. At home, the Transportation Department would get billions
to build a new airport-security agency almost from scratch.

The costs of the war are larger than earlier predictions, and an
estimated $14 billion is requested just to help carry the Pentagon and
intelligence agencies through the last months of this fiscal year.
Within the State Department, $120 million would go to rehabilitate the
once abandoned U.S. Embassy compound in Kabul, Afghanistan, and
conventional foreign aid -- about $1.2 billion in the president's
request -- is only part of larger transfer of funds to U.S. allies.

Afghanistan, Turkey, the Philippines and a variety of governments in
Central Asia and the Persian Gulf region are all prominent. None,
though, are more so than Pakistan. The Pentagon requests $420 million
more to compensate nations such as Pakistan and Jordan for logistical
support provided U.S. military operations. The State Department would
add an additional $114 million for international narcotics control,
much of it targeted at heroin trafficking in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Within the $1.2 billion foreign-aid request, $373 million would be in
the form of military assistance spread among 19 nations. But the
greater focus is on more-general aid, including $525 million in
economic-support funds, which typically carry fewer restrictions in
how the money is used.

In this hemisphere, Mexico and Colombia would receive the most aid,
and the administration asks for new authority to allow the Bogota
government to more freely use U.S. assistance to help President Andres
Pastrana combat leftist guerrillas.

Hundreds of millions of dollars and military helicopters have been
furnished to Colombia to fight drug trafficking, but Congress has
imposed restrictions for fear of being drawn into a larger civil war.
The language now proposed by the administration establishes a two-year
window -- fiscal 2002 and 2003 -- in which the money may be used "to
support a unified campaign against narcotics trafficking, terrorist
activities, and other threats to [the government's] national security."

Among domestic departments, Mr. Bush wants $4.7 billion for
Transportation, chiefly for airport security but also including $255
million for the Coast Guard. He has pledged $5.5 billion this year to
assist New York's recovery from the Sept. 11 attacks on the World
Trade Center. And almost $1 billion more would be spread among a
variety of domestic accounts, including a $20 million initiative to
add 100 personnel in the corporate-finance and enforcement divisions
of the Securities and Exchange Commission after the Enron Corp. debacle.

Some of these smaller expenditures are offset by $251 million in cuts
from prior appropriations, but the biggest, $750 million for the Labor
Department, is treated as an emergency much like the costs of the war.

Most of the Labor money would go to training programs for dislocated
workers, and the proposal builds on initiatives designed last fall to
stimulate the economy and specifically help people, such as hotel
workers, who lost their jobs as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks. The
administration would now apply the resources for all dislocated
workers, and the extra spending follows criticism from Democrats that
Mr. Bush's budget for fiscal 2003 would cut from government training
programs.

While called an "emergency" for this fiscal year, in fact, the
president's request specifies that the full $750 million would remain
available through fiscal 2003. The result is to greatly restore the
proposed cuts and avoid political attacks going into the November elections.