Military budget authority for Fiscal Year 2002 (Bush's first budget year) was $362.1 billion. Authority for Fiscal Year 2005 (by the time the supplementals for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan get added in) will total about $500 billion. However, without the supplemental, it comes to $423.1 billion. Compared with FY02 (the last fiscal year before Iraq and Afghanistan), that's about a 17 percent hike. Over the same period, R & D has risen from $48.7 billion to $68.9 billion—a 40 percent increase. In other words, to get a handle on a looming budget crisis that makes the current problem look trivial, Bush and Rumsfeld need to scrutinize the R & D accounts and purge them of projects that aren't really needed. Meanwhile, another alarming trend has taken hold of the procurement account. Usually, if a budget rises steadily, outlays lag behind budget authority. This makes sense, as first-year outlays are only a fraction of the appropriation. However, in the Fiscal Year 2005 budget (passed this year), budget authority for weapons procurement amounts to $74.9 billion, while outlays total $78.2 billion. In other words, the outlays for programs passed two and three years ago are starting to overwhelm the Pentagon's ability to control spending, even assuming dramatic cuts in budget authority next year.