Senate Republicans’ pending proposal to give the Pentagon more flexibility to administer pending “sequestration” budget cuts was panned yesterday by the White House and senators on both sides of the aisle.
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) pitched legislation to their Republican colleagues yesterday that would keep the unpopular sequestration cuts–of $85 billion in defense and non-defense spending over the next seven months–but change the law so they are not applied in an across-the-board manner. If congressional Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on a plan to stop the decade-long sequestration cuts from starting on Friday, $46 billion will be cut from the Pentagon’s budget from March 1 to Sept. 30. And that would be done by slicing 13 percent nearly all from program, project and activity (PPA) accounts.
Inhofe and Toomey’s plan would keep the amount of the sequestration cuts, but allow the Pentagon and other impacted agencies to shift the size of the cut to PPAs. Thus, the executive branch would be able to add funding to one PPA by making a comparable offset to another, according to a senator briefed on the plan during a lunch meeting yesterday.
“That would allow, in the case of the defense portion of it, the service chiefs to take the same topline and then make adjustments within,” Inhofe told reporters yesterday. “While it still would be devastating to the military, (but) not nearly as devastating.”
Republicans opposed to the idea include SASC member John McCain (R-Ariz.), who argues he has worked too hard on the defense appropriations bill to now cede authority over the same military matters to the Pentagon. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) gave a similar argument to reporters yesterday, saying he would not do anything to make the sequestration cuts more palatable as he tries to compel Republicans to relent and allow more revenue-generating measures in an alternative deficit-cutting plan to replace sequestration.
“Those cuts will go forward,” Reid said about sequestration. “They’re all cuts. I think we need some revenue to take the pressure off of everybody….Until there is some agreement on revenue, I believe we should just go ahead with the sequester.”
President Barack Obama also stuck with his argument that Republicans must allow more revenues in an plan to replace the $1.2 trillion in decade-long sequestration cuts. At a speech at Huntington Ingalls Industries’ [HII] Newport News Shipbuilding yesterday, he rejected the proposal to give his administration flexibility with the sequestration cuts.
“The problem is, when you’re cutting $85 billion in seven months, which represents over a 10 percent cut in the defense budget in seven months, there’s no smart way to do that,” Obama told shipbuilders. “There’s no smart way to do that. You don’t want to have to choose between, let’s say, ‘Do I close funding for the disabled kid or the poor kid?’ ‘Do I close this Navy shipyard or some other one?’ When you’re doing things in a way that’s not smart, you cant’ gloss over the pain and the impact it’s going to have on the economy.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he favors such flexibility-granting legislation, but acknowledged the Republican caucus’ mixed feelings.
“I would be happy to give the president more flexibility and rely on the agency heads to apportion this amount of spending reduction in a different way than the sequester envisioned,” McConnell said at the Capitol. “There are some members of our conference who are suspicious (of the) administration taking advantage of such flexibility would seek to punish their political enemy. Though there are differences of opinion about that, we’re continuing to discuss all of that within our conference.”
On the House side of the Capitol, the Appropriations Committee heard yesterday from the chiefs of the military services, who are alarmed about both the sequestration cuts and the possibility that Congress could skip on passing an actual defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2013, which ends Sept. 30. A temporary continuing resolution (CR) funding the Pentagon near last year’s levels, which restricts its budgeting flexibility, expires March 27.
House Appropriations Committee (HAC) Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) told the Pentagon brass that while his panel cannot stop sequestration now, it does have the “jurisdiction to try and help loosen the chains and allow the (Defense) Department some funding flexibility in order to do its best with what it has.”
Rogers wants a new CR package for the final months of FY ’13 that includes a full-blown FY ’13 defense appropriations bill. The measure would factor in the sequestration reductions but prevent the cuts from being applied in an unyielding, across-the-board manner. Rogers planned to plead with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to bring the package to the floor for a vote.
“If enacted, this package will avoid a government shutdown, while prioritizing (Department of Defense) DoD and Veterans programs and ensuring some much-needed funding flexibility,” Rogers said.
Multiple HAC members talked during the hearing about wanting to grant the Pentagon more leeway with applying the cuts.