The Senate passed via a 73-26 vote on Wednesday a level-funded $518 billion defense appropriations bill after rejecting an attempt to reduce military-biofuel funds in it.
The Senate made no major changes to the fiscal year 2013 “continuing resolution,” (CR) to which the long-delayed Pentagon budget bill is attached, during more than a week of stop-and-start debate on the Senate floor. During a series of final amendment votes, senators shot down a proposal from Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to cut $60 million from Pentagon biofuels-development efforts and shift funding to military operations and maintenance accounts. The amendment needed the support of 60 senators, and failed in a 40-59 vote.
“The Senate has made it clear its support for biofuels,” Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said on the Senate floor. “The Toomey amendment would cut a modest investment to provide secure alternatives to petroleum dependence.” She pointed to two previous Senate votes to reject Republican amendments to thwart the Pentagon’s work to develop biofuels, when GOP senators argued such costly work should not be funded by the military.
The CR awaits the House and White House’s final approvals, which are expected this week. The legislation–which also contains the homeland security, commerce-justice-science, military construction-veterans affairs, and agriculture appropriations bills–would replace the barebones CR that has funded the government since FY ’13 started Oct. 1 and expires March 27.
The measure would fund the Pentagon for the remainder of FY ’13, which ends Sept. 30, near the FY ’12 level of $518 billion. It would give the Pentagon a full-blown defense appropriations bill and reprogramming authority it has not had since FY ’13 started–a key tool military officials plan to use to shift around funding as they grapple with “sequestration” budget cuts that started March 1. Those are the $500 billion in across-the-board reductions to defense spending over the next decade, $46 billion of which fall in FY ’13. The new defense bill also shifts around FY ’13 funding in ways military leaders say is needed, boosting operations and maintenance funding by $10.4 billion and reducing procurement and research and development accounts by $6.7 billion.
The House two weeks ago passed a slightly different CR, which contains fewer appropriations bills for federal agencies than the Senate version has. Yet the House and Senate CRs contain the same defense appropriations bill. The only difference is the House version includes a 0.109 percent reduction to “security” funding, while the Senate version set that reduction at 0.092 percent, according to SAC staff. Thus, the Senate bill includes a $517.7 billion base defense budget, while the House version calls for $517.6 billion.
As soon as the Senate passed the CR late Wednesday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) kicked off consideration of the longterm federal budget resolution approved last week by the Senate Budget Committee. The Republican-led House has been debating its dueling version of the non-binding resolution since Tuesday. While the House is weighing the budget resolution the House Budget Committee approved last week, it also is considering multiple alternative plans, including one from House Democrats that would eliminate sequestration with new revenues garnered through tax-code reforms
The House Budget Committee’s plan calls for higher base defense funding than the Senate Budget Committee’s plan does.
The Senate Budget Committee’s proposal calls for ending the $500 billion in longterm defense sequestration cuts but keeping roughly half that amount–$240 billion–in other Pentagon reductions. The House plan, by contrast, would technically keep the sequestration cuts, which total more than $1 trillion over a decade when defense and non-defense spending are counted. Yet the House panel’s resolution says for defense spending over the next decade it has “approximately $500 billion more than will be available absent changes in the Budget Control Act,” referencing the law that created sequestration.
Thus, the spending levels the House resolution proposes for national defense from FY ’14 to FY ’23 range from being the same as in the Senate plan (in FY ’14) to being as much as 8 percent higher than the Senate resolution’s level (in FY ’23), according to an analysis by Byron Callan, director of Capital Alpha Partners LLC in Washington.