A group of GOP senators pledged yesterday to launch an aggressive fight next month for stopping $600 billion in planned defense budget cuts while still allowing some Pentagon “efficiencies.”
Meanwhile, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) chairman also unveiled legislation yesterday intended to shield the Pentagon from planned spending reductions.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, said he and a group of Senate Armed Service Committee (SASC) members will introduce legislation after the upcoming congressional recess “that will give us a roadmap for avoiding the across-the-board sequester (budget cuts, while) still achieving the necessary spending reductions.”
The group–including SASC Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)–wants to stop the so-called sequestration cuts now due to occur under the Budget Control Act of 2011.
The law passed in August says if the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction–or “super committee”–could not craft a plan to cut at least $1.2 trillion in federal spending over 10 years by Nov. 23 that passes Congress by Dec. 23, a sequestration mechanism would automatically trigger $1.2 trillion in cuts in January 2013, with half coming from the Pentagon. The committee failed to craft a plan last month. The added defense cuts, of up to $600 billion, would be on top of $450 billion from the Pentagon’s 10-year spending plans already approved by the law.
Kyl called for replacing the $600 billion in sequestration cuts to defense with savings already identified by the super committee, on which he sat, and by members of the deficit group that negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden. Kyl also proposed factoring in “a lot of other potential savings” including some identified by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).
During a Capitol Hill press conference, Kyl said the legislation the group is working on will identify specific, alternate areas of the federal budget that could be trimmed in place of the sequestration cuts. Those replacement spending reductions will be identified with specific dollar amounts scored by the Congressional Budget Office. He said their alternate plan would stop not only the $600 billion in defense cuts, but also the other $600 billion in non-defense sequestration reductions identified by the Budget Control Act.
Kyl said the plan to thwart the sequestration cuts could be enacted once or annually.
“Once a year we could decide to take the money that would otherwise be sequestered, pull the savings together that would offset that, and pass that,” he said.
His comments reflect how tricky pro-defense lawmakers have found their quest to prevent the military sequestration cuts to be.
“The bottom line is that we will identify savings, we will present that in the best legislative vehicle we can, and thereby offset the savings that would be required through the sequester,” Kyl said.
He said he has talked to “very interested” House members about the proposal, but lamented that only Republicans have vociferously denounced the defense sequestration cuts thus far.
He said he hopes to garner bipartisan support for their alternate proposal, because it would also prevent across-the-board cuts to non-defense discretionary spending supported by Democrats.
Kyl and McCain maintained the defense savings need to be reversed soon, because the reductions are slated to start in 2013 and the Pentagon would need a year to plan the cuts.
“We face a choice in January,” McCain said, standing alongside Kyl. “The Pentagon will either begin to plan on budgets for 2013 that will cause drastic cuts to all aspects of our national defense, or we will be able to reverse this misbegotten idea of mandatory sequestration and make the kinds of cuts that (we) could easily make in other aspects of our nation’s economy.”
McCain, still, argued the senators are not “for leaving defense sacrosanct.”
“I will take a backseat to no one in my efforts to try to reform the corruption in the Pentagon which characterizes our weapons acquisition process,” he said.
“We will include efficiencies in defense spending that need to be made in our proposal,” he said, “but not anywhere near the magnitude” required under sequestration.
President Barack Obama said on Nov. 21, the day the super committee announced defeat, that he would “veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending.” He said he wanted congressional Democrats and Republicans to agree on a large-scale deficit-cutting plan.
It was not clear yesterday if that veto threat would apply the plan the GOP senators are crafting.
Graham, at the press conference, said he “can’t conceive of” a president threatening to veto an effort to “save the Defense Department from ruin.”
The South Carolina Republican argued the sequestration cuts would “destroy the defense-industrial base in this country” and put the nation at risk.
He predicted when the deficit debate “is all said and done the Defense Department’s not going to be gutted.”
HASC Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) announced late yesterday he introduced the Down Payment To Protect National Security Act. He dubbed it “an effort to pay for the first year of sequestration cuts without doing serious harm to America’s military.”
The bill, which he said is co-sponsored by Republican members of the defense committees, “holds to the spirit” of the Budget Control Act “and leaves total sequestration caps in place.”
His legislation “imposes a reduction of federal workforce by 10 percent through attrition and applies the savings to pay for one year of sequestration, for defense and non-defense categories,” his office said in a statement. “A 10 percent reduction will be achieved over 10 years by only hiring one federal bureaucrat for every three who retire.”
He argued it “is time we address our debt crisis sensibly, by literally shrinking the size of government.”