The fiscal year 2015 budget request hasn’t even been released yet but already faces steep opposition from Congress, where members disapprove of the platforms that will be cut, the assumption that full sequestration will be avoided in FY ’16 and beyond, and the suggestion that the military will only be able to train and deploy properly if Congress agrees to an extra $26 billion in spending, which would be paid for by new revenue sources, according to GOP leaders of the Senate and House armed services committees.
The Defense Department will submit its budget request to Congress on Tuesday, asking for $496 billion in base spending and an additional $26 billion in a separate $56 billion government-wide “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative” the Obama administration will pitch to Congress. Though several top defense officials have said this week that military readiness will be at unacceptable levels without this $26 billion, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) told reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast that the package is not likely to pass.
McKeon said he did not support new or higher taxes, even to pay for defense spending. Inhofe said he disagrees with the supplemental spending plan because it, like sequestration and the Bipartisan Budget Agreement passed in December, treats defense and non-defense discretionary spending the same.
“In looking at sequestration, why should 18 percent of the budget be responsible for 50 percent of the cuts?” he said. “And that’s the way it was. Well this [spending package] just carries on from that. So while it sounds good, perhaps we’d be able to come up with some money to lessen the pain of sequestration on the military, there’s even more on the domestic side.”
As for the out-years, in which the Pentagon will ask for $115 billion more than is allowed under sequestration’s spending caps, both McKeon and Inhofe dismissed the idea of Congress approving the higher spending level. The Pentagon has talked about the Army dropping down to 440,000 soldiers in the budget plan and 420,000 under full sequestration–whereas defense officials all week have referred to a 440,000-man Army, McKeon and Inhofe cited the 420,000 figure throughout the media event.
“Right now, looking forward, I don’t see any possibility of overturning [sequestration],” McKeon said. “My read on it is, there are people who have bought into it, who think it is doing a good job, that it’s really cutting our spending, and so I personally just don’t see that that’s going to end until a lot of pain is felt by a lot of people.”
McKeon predicted a tough year as Congress works on the National Defense Authorization Act and the defense appropriations bill. He noted that DoD included such dramatic cuts in its budget request that members of Congress would end up making major revisions before a bill goes to the floor for votes.
“We have some members from Virginia that have very strong concerns about the Navy,” he said as an example. “So while [DoD] didn’t say we’re going to get rid of a carrier task force, what they did say was we’re not going to refuel it, which means you take it out of the force. So that takes you down to 10. Where do you think that’s going to go? And this year, instead of mothballing seven cruisers, we’re going to just set 11 of them aside. Where do you think that’s going?”
“What they’re trying to do is set up a system where it’s so bad that we’re going to have to raise taxes,” McKeon concluded. “Well, we’re not going to raise taxes, so it’s going to be a very tough fight.”
He said he expects the full committee markup would go longer than its normal 16 hours of debate, with so many controversial cuts in the budget and so little money to go around.
Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox told an audience Wednesday morning at the American Enterprise Institute that the budget request is “a tightly-crafted package where if you don’t get this, something else comes out. And then it goes to the Hill and they take it piece, piece, piece. I wish I had a magic solution. All I can say is we’re going to do everything in our power to explain those tradeoffs. If they force, as they have every year, us to keep things we don’t want to keep, something else happens. And we are at the point, even with the $115 billion additional, that there’s very few places it can come out. It ends up coming out, pretty much, from readiness.”
Despite that warning, McKeon said it was inevitable that lawmakers would get into parochial battles to protect military assets in their home districts, and Inhofe said he thought that parochialism was a good thing because it creates passionate arguments that lead to informed votes and, typically, an efficient end result.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey will unveil the line-by-line budget request on Tuesday and will then testify before SASC on Wednesday and HASC on Thursday.