Senate Democrats unveiled a broad budget resolution Wednesday that calls for ending the $500 billion in across-the-board “sequestration” cuts to defense over a decade but keeping roughly half that amount–$240 billion–in targeted Pentagon reductions.
“Our budget saves $240 billion by carefully and responsibly reducing defense spending while giving the Pentagon enough time to plan and align the reductions to time with the drawdown of troops from overseas,” Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Wednesday, the first of two days the panel will spending deliberation the budget resolution.
“This will involve some tough decisions, but it is a responsible path that is nothing like the across-the-board cuts from sequestration that would be devastating to defense programs and jobs if they weren’t replaced,” she added.
Her comments came as she prepared late Wednesday to officially release the Senate Budget Committee’s non-binding budget resolution for government spending over the next decade, dubbed the Foundation for Growth: Restoring the Promise of American Opportunity. The Senate panel, under pressure from Republicans, is crafting such a spending roadmap for the first time in four years. The GOP-led House Budget Committee unveiled a starkly different longterm budget resolution Tuesday.
The House plan would keep the sequestration cuts, the $1.2 trillion in decade-long reductions to defense and non-defense spending that started March 1. Yet the GOP-led House Budget Committee calls for making up for the defense sequestration cuts with other funding. Murray’s Senate version, by contrast, would end sequestration.
The Senate Budget Committee calls for a total of $875 billion in cuts in its budget resolution. In addition to the $240 billion in defense cuts, it proposes a $500 billion reduction to domestic spending.
Murray said the plan “makes some tough choices” on cuts and protects no “sacred cows.”
“We think every program, including the ones we know are important, need to be wringing out waste, trimming fat, and reducing costs to taxpayers,” she said.
The House Budget Committee’s plan, unveiled Tuesday by panel chairman and former vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), calls for slight increases in defense spending over the next decade that are not as much as House Republicans previously sought.
Ryan’s proposal, The Path to Prosperity, seeks $560.2 billion for defense spending in fiscal year 2014. That’s more than the $525.4 billion Pentagon budget President Barack Obama sought for FY ’13 and the $518 billion budget the Pentagon is due to receive in FY ’13 via a “continuing resolution” the House and Senate are debating.
The House panel proposes more than $6 trillion for defense over the next decade. That is not as much as House Republicans proposed in past resolutions and–notably–is more than $2 trillion less than Ryan and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney proposed last year.
“While this is significantly less than the levels in previous budget resolutions passed by the House, it is approximately $500 billion more than will be available absent changes in the Budget Control Act,” the House resolution says, referencing the 2011 law that created sequestration.
While the House plan would boost Pentagon spending above the sequestration levels, it would not actually stop those $500 billion in decade-long cuts to planned defense spending, which originated with the 2011 Budget Control Act.
Both the Republican House and Democratic Senate proposals are being adamantly opposed by members of the opposing parties. The House plan calls for keeping the sequestration cuts, balancing the federal deficit over the decade through significant budget cuts, radically reworking Medicare, and killing parts of Obama’s health-care reform. The Senate proposal seeks $975 billion in new taxes over a decade, while also increasing some spending to boost the economy.