A commenter on S. 3001, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, which passed the House yesterday, pointed out a large discrepancy between the cost figures reported here on WashingtonWatch.com and on a worthy similar site, GovTrack.

The GovTrack page on S. 3001 recites costs of $23 per American. (The commenter actually reported the cost from GovTrack at $230.) Meanwhile, our page was showing costs of nearly $9,000 per U.S. family, or $2,800 per person. That’s quite a discrepancy.

Well, I’ve checked it all out, and believe that the GovTrack estimate is very low because it may only include direct spending, not authorized spending, which is the bulk of it – about $600 billion.

However, in reviewing our numbers, I discovered that we were using total defense spending for our cost estimate, not the amount of spending that the bill would authorize. Spending is already authorized in existing law, and this bill does not affect that, so reporting total spending was an error.

The new cost estimate we’re reporting is a little over $5,600 per family and $1,800 per person. (The specific figure will vary from week to week with changes in interest rates, population, and the coming change in fiscal year.)

That’s a big discrepancy from the earlier numbers, and I apologize for the error in our reporting.