May 3, 2006 2:46PM # Operation Human Shield By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE It is not offensive that Congress is [planning ](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5378505)to spend $70 billion to assist American soldiers in a hostile foreign nation. What’s offensive is that Congress is using those soldiers as human shields to protect $70 billion it is wasting on less defensible priorities. The spending bill that the Senate is expected to vote on today has been designated “emergency” spending. In effect, that means it doesn’t count toward the spending caps that Congress supposedly imposes on itself. It has become [routine](https://www.cato.org/dailys/05-10-04.html) for Congress to meet those caps by packing the regular spending bills with junk and then to spend well beyond those caps by labeling predictable expenditures “emergency” needs. So every $1 billion of Iraq war spending they label as “emergency” allows them to spend another $1 billion on junk. Talk about war profiteering. ##### Related Tags [Defense and Foreign Policy](https://www.cato.org/defense-foreign-policy), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).