Cornell Chronicle

Kreps says:

“The Overseas Contingency Operations fund is meant to be for unanticipated purposes that are ‘sudden...urgent ...unforeseen...and temporary.’ The virtue of this type of funding is that it is exempt from budget control limits set by the Budget Control Act of 2011 and subsequent caps. 

“Although a 1985 Deficit Control Act created the statutory authority for emergency defense spending, the prevalence of its use is primarily post-9/11, and within that timeframe, an Obama creation. The Bush-era ‘Global War on Terror’ label was much maligned, so Obama, in a document entitled A New Era of Fiscal Responsibility, actually did the opposite and made the budget for these overseas conflicts less transparent.

“The Overseas Contingency Operations fund has become a subterfuge, a place that is inoculated from the discretionary spending limits. Moreover, a decade in, it is hard to imagine that activities funded via the account are unanticipated, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, or temporary. But it is politically convenient for the executive and Congress alike because they can avoid the hard questions about the open-endedness of these operations.”

Carlson says:

“Most of the post-election analysis is likely to focus on issues with a return to divided government in Washington. This misses a much more fundamental point: the deepening division within the country between red and blue states.  The coasts and metro centers remain quite liberal, while the rural center has become even more conservative. This election was largely about identity politics and cultural values much more than it was about any specific policies.

“Despite the fact that they are arguably suffering the most as a result of the President's trade war with China, rural voters widely cast their votes for candidates on the ballot who were most closely aligned with Trump. Within such a climate I suspect China barely registered in the minds of most voters.  As a result, moving forward both parties will only deal with China through the prism of what has become a zero-sum battle between them over who will govern the United States now and in 2020.

“For Democrats there is little to be gained by taking a gentler approach to China.  For Republicans, China serves as convenient target upon which to project the fears of their core supporters. Above and beyond this, the President's whims, informed by the anti-free trade views of his closest advisors, will then continue to drive China policy.  Given his unpredictability, this capriciousness – more than anything else coming out of Washington, D.C. – is what in all likelihood worries China's leaders the most.”