The Citizen

Issue date: 10/31/07 Section: KSG News

By Ben Branham, News Editor

On October 24, Prof. Linda Bilmes was one of three witnesses called before the U.S. House Committee on the Budget for its first-ever hearing on the growing costs of the Iraq War. Bilmes, who teaches several budgeting courses, has become an oft-cited and respected expert since first writing about the issue in 2005.

Q: What prompted you to first start looking into the costs of the war?
A: I started looking at this because my students were asking me about it. We were talking about the long-term costs of things, and they asked, "What are the long-term costs of the war? How much is it really going to cost?" And I said, "That's a good question." And in the spring of '05 I asked Professor William Nordhaus of Yale, who had done a groundbreaking paper before the war began about the potential costs of the war and the prolonged occupation if the war went badly. And he said, "No one has looked at this." So I started looking at it in my spare time, and I was astounded that when I added up the operating costs and the long-term costs of taking care of veterans and the cost of replenishing all the military equipment and the other military costs like depreciation - that the total costs were already at a trillion dollars.

Q: So you published an op-ed with that number in the New York Times. Then what?
A: Then [Former World Bank Chief Economist and Nobel Prize Winner] Joe Stiglitz of Columbia contacted me, and together we wrote a paper on the cost of the war, including economic costs, which pushed the total to nearly two trillion. That was a large number, but veterans groups from all over the country phoned us and said, "Thank you for shining a spotlight on the veterans costs, but actually your costs are too low." They showed me that our model was based on the official number of wounded put out by the Pentagon. But if you are wounded outside of combat, you don't show up on that list. For fatalities, the statistics include you if your helicopter is shot down by enemy fire, or if it crashes during a training mission. But if you are in a helicopter training accident, you do not show up in the official list of wounded soldiers. The Pentagon keeps a second, hard-to-find list of these sorts of casualties. The total number of wounded, injured or ill-including combat and non-combat-is not 28,000. It's over 60,000. That changes the cost structure, because anybody who's been wounded during their deployment is entitled to receive veterans medical care and disability benefits and other compensation. So I published a second paper, focusing on veterans.

Q: Have you been surprised by all the attention your work has received?
A: It's actually an interesting lesson in life, because this wasn't a study that I started doing because I thought should do it or because I thought it would be good for my career. I did it because I just wanted to know. I wanted to find out. And so it was by following my own interest and doing something I really cared about that my research received so much attention.

Q: Tell us about your other work.
A: I have another book coming out this spring on the civil service. A lot of people, including my kids, think that only two people will read it: me and my co-author. But actually it is a very important topic. This book is about the 1.8 million people all over the country who run the government - who you depend on to get absolutely everything done. They're the people who list the ingredients on the breakfast cereal box. They run the atomic clock. There's nothing that doesn't go back to this group of people in government who we depend on all the time. And yet they're not viewed, in my opinion, as a strategic resource. We don't invest in them.

Q: Have you ever taken a good look at the KSG budget?
A: When Dean Ellwood first took over, he appointed a faculty committee to look at the budget situation, and I co-chaired it with Mary Jo Bane. The Kennedy School is a remarkably complicated institution, given that its budget is only $125 million. It has all these different centers, which each have their own budgets, and within each of the centers there's restricted money and unrestricted money. So, from the Dean's perspective you don't have that much latitude over how you can spend the money. What was particularly striking was how much of the budget is devoted to non-teaching - in other words, research and outreach. The total amount of our budget that we actually devote to teaching is less than what I think it should be.

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