By Emelie Rutherford
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said yesterday he is optimistic a presidential deficit-reduction commission will heed the call of over 50 lawmakers to seek significant weapon-system cuts in the Pentagon budget.
Frank spoke to reporters yesterday in advance of the release budget-cutting proposals, due Dec. 1, from President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The bipartisan commission is charged in part with making recommendations for balancing the nation’s budget, excluding interest payments on debt, by 2015.
Frank and 56 other lawmakers sent the commission a letter yesterday declaring: “Given the size of our deficit and debt problems as well as the political challenges and policy controversies involved in implementing any solutions to them, it is clear to us that cutting the military budget must be part of any viable proposal.”
Early this year, Obama called for freezing the federal budget items for three years but not including defense spending. Frank and the other lawmakers want to ensure defense spending receives the same scrutiny non-military spending receives from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
“The deficit-reduction commission is a forum in which choices have to be made, and we think in that forum we can make a very good case for this choice,” Frank said. “The way our budget process works (in Congress), unfortunately, we don’t get to pose one priority against another. We get to vote up or down on each issue (on the House and Senate floors).
Frank said the commission’s co-chairs–Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to previous President Bill Clinton–told him they were “pleased” his group was examining defense cutes.
“Because they do understand they’ve got tough choices to make and they want to have the full range of choices before them,” the Massachusetts Democrat told reporters.
Yesterday’s letter from the 57 lawmakers came a day before the conservative Defending Defense Project–made up of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Foreign Policy Initiative think tanks–planned to unveil a briefing paper calling for increased defense spending at a Capitol Hill event today. Many Republicans, including those on the House Armed Services Committee, support increased defense spending, and their party could take control of the House after the mid-term elections next month.
Nonetheless, Frank said he is hopeful his calls for defense cuts will get more traction than they have in the past because the current federal budget dilemma is “zero sum.”
“Yes there are fears about cutting (the) defense budget,” he said. “There are also fears about cutting Medicare and Social Security.”
Frank’s letter calling for the defense cuts was co-signed by lawmakers including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the No. 2 Senate appropriator, as well House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and House appropriator Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.). Frank organized the letter with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who was the only GOP signer.
The lawmakers note, in their letter to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, that the Pentagon takes up nearly 56 percent of all discretionary federal spending and accounts for almost 65 percent of the increase in annual discretionary spending levels since 2001. While much of that increase is due to direct war costs, they say, almost 37 percent of discretionary spending growth falls under the base defense budget.
They argue a rigorous analysis of the Pentagon budget “will show that substantial spending cuts can be made without threatening our national security, without cutting essential funds for fighting terrorism, and without shirking our obligations as a nation to our brave troops currently in the field, our veterans, and our military retirees.”
Frank and the 56 other lawmakers want to reap “significant savings” by “reforming the process by which the Pentagon engages in weapons research, development and procurement, manages its resources, and provides support services.”
They also call for scaling back “Cold War-era weapons systems and initiatives such as missile defense” and U.S. military commitments overseas.
Frank also created the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a group of national-security experts that in June released a report calling for trimming the Pentagon’s budget by $960 billion over the next decade. Some of the task force members joined Frank in the conference call yesterday.
The Sustainable Defense Task Force wants to cut weapon systems including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and MV-22 tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft, and reduce the target number of Navy ships from 313 to 230 (Defense Daily, July 21).
Charles Knight, the co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute, emphasized during yesterday’s call that the Sustainable Defense Task Force is focused on addressing medium-term fiscal problems after the nation recovers from the current economic recession and the war in Afghanistan ends. Three-quarters of the defense reductions proposed in the report would happen from 2015 through 2020, a period he said would be after the end of the war and recession.
Before its Dec. 1 deadline, Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is slated to have one more meeting, on Nov. 10.
Bloomberg reported yesterday that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen said more cuts to weapons programs will likely be proposed by the Pentagon in its fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. “There will be more cuts,” Mullen reportedly said in an interview during a taping of “Conversations with Judy Woodruff” airing Oct. 15 on Bloomberg Television.
“Major programs from all the services which aren’t performing well, which can’t get themselves under control in terms of cost and schedule, they’re going to be looking at either being slowed down dramatically or being eliminated,” he said, according to the wire service. He reportedly said if the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, which Lockheed Martin [LMT] and General Dynamics [GD] are competing to build, won’t have “much of a future” if its cost and schedule are not controlled.