In 2011 first the Kan and then the Noda administration proposed and pushed through the legislature three disaster-related supplemental budgets.
Mr. Rumsfeld arrived in 2001 to inherit a budget already in development by the Clinton administration, and the war in Afghanistan shaped planning for fiscal 2003 and supplemental budgets.
"I recognize that the budget is higher now than it's ever been," he added, referring to the combined total of the basic annual Defense Department budget and the special supplemental budgets to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last year, the economy rolled ahead in the first and second quarters on the back of record supplemental budgets, only to choke in the second half of the year when government spending dwindled.
But economists doubted their effectiveness, and noted that there was still seven trillion yen in government credit guarantees -- about $65 billion -- available under less restrictive programs from the last two supplemental budgets.
While that set a record, it would represent a decline in public spending of 4.5percentt from the previous fiscal year -- when Parliament passed one of the largest supplemental budgets ever -- unless a new supplemental budget is indeed introduced and adopted.
He said in a telephone interview that Mr. Gore's speech was "absurd," in part because the Clinton-Gore administration had submitted 13 supplemental budgets over the last seven years, spending plans that were submitted when the nation was "several hundred million dollars in the hole".
WASHINGTON — As Congress and the public focus on more than $600 billion already approved in supplemental budgets to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for counterterrorism operations, the Bush administration has with little notice approached a landmark in military spending.
