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Obama to seek $537 billion defense budget

26 February 2009 08:10 (UTC +04:00)

Washington-APA. President Barack Obama will sketch out a robust U.S. military budget for next year totaling $537 billion, a senior Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Wednesday.
Obama is scheduled to release on Thursday an outline of his budget proposal for fiscal 2010, which begins on October 1.
Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who oversees defense spending in the House, told Reuters that "$537 billion will be the base budget" for the Pentagon.
But he added that he was not sure whether the $537 billion would include any money the Pentagon is expected to need to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year.
The Pentagon’s base budget -- not counting most war funding -- totaled $515 billion for the current year.