The House and Senate armed services committees seem well positioned to work out the differences between their bills this fall, but the political pressure and lack of time that comes along with it being an election year may keep Congress from finishing its appropriations bills before Oct. 1–likely leading to a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government until after the November election, a House Armed Services subcommittee chairman told reporters Tuesday.

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), chairman of the readiness subcommittee, said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast that “I’d love to see all the appropriations bills get done prior to the end of the budget year, but all the conversations I’ve had–and I’m an eternal optimist–all the conversations I’ve had point to a short-term CR until after the election and then putting together the budget bills.”

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), chairman of the House Armed Services readiness subcommittee
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), chairman of the House Armed Services readiness subcommittee

He noted that the House had already passed six of its 12 and was set to pass a seventh this week, which puts them much further along than any year in recent memory. The Senate has not passed any spending bills on the floor but is rapidly moving the bills out of the committee. Wittman said that provides a framework to quickly negotiate an omnibus spending bill–a giant piece of legislation that includes all the spending bills for the whole federal government–shortly after the election.

“In the past there hasn’t been a certainty because the CRs look like they’re going to be the way of budgeting” due to a lack of an ability to pass spending bills in either chamber.

On the authorization side, the full House already passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015, and the Senate Armed Services Committee finished its bill and is awaiting floor time still. Wittman said he did not see any “alarming” differences between the two and was confident the lawmakers could work out the differences in their bills.

But, he noted, the administration sent its Overseas Contingency Operations funding request to Congress after the House passed its NDAA, leaving it to oversight opportunities.

Wittman said he expected a lot of questions about OCO funding would come up when HASC and SASC members sit down in a conference committee later this year. The administration is supposed to provide Congress with a more detailed version of the OCO request that would outline how much money is going to actual contingencies–predominately operations in Afghanistan, which are quickly winding down–versus operations like counter-piracy near the Arabian Sea and Africa that have become standard missions for the Pentagon and need to be moved into the base budget.

More broadly, Wittman said the initial OCO estimate from the Pentagon was $79 billion, so he wants to better understand why the final request was $20 billion lower and what resources or missions will not be performed with this smaller OCO request.

Specific to his role as readiness subcommittee chair, Wittman said he wanted to take a close look at the OCO request’s support for resetting the force for post-Afghanistan operations.

“How are we resetting the force? How are we recovering equipment, restoring equipment, making sure it’s operational? And then the big issue too is how do we make sure our force is trained for the next challenge ahead?” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of training pipeline issues to get our Marines, our soldiers, even our airmen and our sailors, retrained for the future missions. That’s going to create its own issue,” he said, not confident that the OCO request fully addresses that issue. He said he would work closely with the senators to ensure the OCO budget Congress passes fully addresses the needs of the contingency operations as it is meant to do instead of being a buffer against budget caps for the base budget.