Black budget

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A black budget is a budget that is secretly collected from the overall income of a country, a corporation, a society of any form, a national department, and so on. A black budget usually covers expenses related to military research. The budget is kept secret because of national security reasons.

It has been said that the alleged "Dulce Base" in the U.S. state of New Mexico is run by such budget, as well as many other programs such as Area 51 in Groom Lake, Nevada, and many experimental or covert military programs.

The United States Defense Department has a "black budget" it uses to fund expenditures it does not want to disclose publicly. Such an expenditure is called a "black project." The annual cost of the United States Defense Department black budget is estimated at $40 billion by some watchdogs, but some critics believe it to be much higher ($3 trillion), fed by funds funneled from other government agencies to the defense and intelligence community.

An unverified statement is that by law, the nature and extent of all US tax money expenditure must be recorded in the budget. It is further claimed that the black budget can be determined by adding up all US government expenditure listed in the budget, and subtract that amount from the total budget. The inference being the Black Budget is included in the total budget amount, but not listed in the budget break down.

[edit] Congressional Approval of the Black Budget

The National Security Act of 1947 gave birth to the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council and reorganized the various branches of the military underneath the Department of Defense.

[edit] See also

• Special access program

[edit] External links

• "Paint it Black", a 1997 metroACTIVE article very critical of the use of Black budgets in the US
• "Exposing the Black Budget", a 1995 Wired article with the same stance