Comment by jfengel
3 years ago
Because it was a way to get the budget "balanced". They declared R&D expenses to be different from operating expenses -- if you have the money to spend on R&D then you have money to spend funding the country.
It's never supposed to be about what's "fair" or what they "should" do. It's about the fact that they want to spend $X, and need to raise $X one way or the other.
In this case, though, it was purely a trick. They were required to balance the budget over the long term, so they spent money now and identified a pot of money they could take from later. They just kicked the can down the road, and now we've arrived where the can landed. They actually don't think it's fair, or reasonable, or productive. But changing it does make somebody responsible for a huge increase in the deficit... and it's the people who spent the money 5 years ago.
There is no budget, for a long time. Only spending resolutions. And they’re not b balanced.
Spending resolutions are more important than budgets. So much more important that they're usually just called "budgets" because nobody cares about the thing that is actually a budget.