Congressional Republicans’ plan to fund the defense budget through the wartime spending account is a “road to nowhere,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter warned the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee on May 6.
The GOP budget resolution, which was passed by the Senate yesterday, would boost Overseas Contingency Operations spending to fully fund priorities laid out in the president’s fiscal year 2016 base budget. However, President Barack Obama will not accept a budget that boosts defense at the expense of other spending, Carter told senators. “Legislation that implements this budget framework will therefore be subject to veto.”
The Defense Department and Congress need to work together to develop a plan like the Ryan-Murray bipartisan budget deal in 2013, which allowed the military to evade sequestration for multiple years, Carter said. Having that budget stability allows the Pentagon to do multi-year planning, which eases the minds of military personnel and the defense industrial base.
“Because it doesn’t provide a stable, multi-year budget horizon, this one-year approach is managerially unsound and also unfairly dispiriting to our force,” he said. “Our industry partners, too, need stability and longer term plans, not end of year crises or short term fixes, if they are to be as efficient and cutting edge as we need them to be.”
Failure to develop an alternative to the Republican-backed budget before the end of the fiscal year in October ultimately would force the Defense Department to make hasty, drastic spending decisions, he added.
It’s critical that Congress and Obama agree on a solution, as the services will be forced to change their military strategy if defense spending is cut to levels less than that in the president’s budget, said Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For instance, forward-deployed forces would likely dwindle by one-third under sequestration, he said.
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asked Carter why he wouldn’t support heightening OCO if that meant the Pentagon received more money.
It’s not as simple as getting as much funds as possible, Carter said.
“We need to get a longer horizon,” he said. “A multi-year budget plan, that’s what we’re asking for so we don’t have a one-year at a time approach. You can’t do defense or national security with a one-year-at-a-time approach.”
The advantage of the GOP plan is that it technically adheres to the Budget Control Act, argued Blunt, who voted for the Senate budget resolution. Appropriating the president’s budget would necessitate changing the law, which is more difficult.
The top Democrat on the subcommittee, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), called the GOP plan a “budget gimmick” that would ultimately add to the Pentagon’s problems.
“I believe this effort is not the right way to address the program,” he said. “While I support avoiding sequestration, Congress must address funding shortfalls for the entire government and do it responsibly.”