The former Pentagon comptroller who had the dubious honor of ushering the Defense Department’s finances through sequestration in fiscal year 2013 is warning that the nation’s security can ill afford a perpetuation of the turmoil of the past five years.
“If I left you with one message…it would be one more voice crying, pleading for an end to the budgetary chaos and moving to what I hope would be a two-year budget deal so we don’t have to do all this again next year in the midst of a presidential election,” Bob Hale, the Pentagon’s chief financial officer from 2009-2014, told Defense Daily on Wednesday during an interview at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.
Hale, now a fellow at Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH], is out with a mini-memoir detailing the period following the enactment of the 2012 Budget Control Act that set sequestration in motion. He described the tale as “awfully dour,” but said the paper contains cautionary lessons for lawmakers who could allow sequestration hit again in fiscal 2016 without a compromise on government spending.
“At a minimum, during the next month, or so Congress and the president need to agree on budget changes that provide reasonable levels of funding for DoD and other federal agencies for FY 2016 and FY 2017,” Hale said in his paper, published by Brookings. “This year’s budget deal should cover both years so that the tumult is not repeated next year.”
Hale acknowledged that in a period where the U.S. military had withdrew completely from one war and was drawing down from another after 14 years of continual combat, that a case could have been made for cutting back on defense spending in 2013.
“As far as the total level, it is a legitimate debate to have as to how much we should spend on national defense and there’s no formula. It’s a judgment about risk traded off against dollars,” he said.
“The way it was done definitely made it worse, the across the board nature of the cuts and the limits on the flexibility,” he added, describing a paramount complaint about sequester by uniformed and civilian Defense Department personnel.
Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said during a speech Wednesday afternoon that the Defense Department still needs three to four years to fully recover from the sequester shock of 2013.
Since 2013, the world has become increasingly unstable, Hale said. After a “valley” in spending in 2013 to present, there is a valid defense of President Obama’s 2016 pitch to increase the budget , though his spending plan brings the DoD budget only in line with 2012 levels.
“I think you can make a pretty good case for the president’s proposal for some increases in defense spending,” he said.” The world remains a pretty dangerous place. At the time these decisions were made, we were still involved in combat operations in Afghanistan. We still have troops there, though not in a combat role. Obviously ISIL is a significant threat to our security. North Korea is a bewildering regime. Iran, even with a nuclear deal will probably pose some issues with us in terms of national security.”
The total budget has come down since fiscal 2012, when it was about $530 billion. It declined sharply in fiscal 2013 to around $496 billion when sequestration hit but then leveled off.
At $570 billion, the Obama administration’s fiscal 2016 budget proposal would bring the Defense Department budget about in line with pre-sequester levels with a slight uptick. The most interesting, and potentially encouraging, development is that the modest increases proposed in the fiscal 2016 budget have been approved by all defense and appropriations committees in Congress.
“Now, they’ve done it with the use of this wartime or OCO (overseas contingency operations) budget–which is unfortunate and the president has said he will veto–but they have all agreed to the total level, which I found remarkable,” Hale said.
The Senate Appropriations Committee passed a bill that shuffled about $38 billion in spending to OCO, which Hale called a mistake because it is exempt from the government’s self-prescribed spending caps, but not from sequestration.