The temporary six-month budget the Pentagon will operate under starting Oct. 1 will cause serious problems, spurring officials to examine ways to work around its legal restrictions, the Pentagon’s top finance executive said yesterday.
The Senate passed a temporary six-month government budget for fiscal year 2013 early Saturday morning, before Congress recessed for six weeks, and sent it to President Barack Obama for his expected signature this week. The so-called continuing resolution (CR) gives the Pentagon for six months the equivalent of a $519.9 billion year-long budget–a slight bump of 0.6 percent from the FY ’12 defense budget. That’s more than it was slated to receive in FY ’13 in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and in appropriations bills previously passed by the House and the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Hale said yesterday that the stop-gap budget could cause “serious problems.” The CR does little more than fund the Pentagon, with a few exceptions. The measure does not give the Pentagon legislative authority to undertake new initiatives like starting new contracts and beginning production of weapon systems. He highlighted how it does not allow aircraft carrier overhauls.
“We’re looking at workarounds, but they’re challenging,” he said at an Arlington, Va., event hosted by Government Executive magazine.
Such workarounds, though, would last until December, leaving the Pentagon in a bind after that. Hale said the Pentagon would need a FY ’13 defense authorization bill in place after that, to give the Pentagon the legal authority temporarily addressed by the workarounds. The Senate did not pass a policy-setting defense authorization bill before leaving Washington.
“We need the Congress to return to an orderly budget process,” Hale said, under which it passes both policy-dictating authorization bills and budget-setting appropriations legislation for the Pentagon.
Defense appropriators did insert a few military-related legislative provisions in the CR, including one banning the Air Force from retiring, divesting, realigning, or transferring any aircraft. The Pentagon’s FY ’13 budget initially sought to retire or divest 163 Air National Guard and 82 Air Force Reserve aircraft over the next five years.
Hale also voiced concerns yesterday about so-called sequestration budget cuts. Those are the politically unpopular $1.2 trillion in longterm government spending reductions–$500 billion of which would come from planned Pentagon spending–that will start next January if lawmakers cannot agree to an alternate deficit-cutting plan.
Hale reportedly said the Pentagon may have some flexibility with applying the across-the-board cuts, which administration and congressional officials have said would be made to all non-exempt programs, projects, and activities (PPAs). Cutting at the PPA level would dig into separate weapons programs. Yet Hale said yesterday the Pentagon may have the flexibility to apply the sequestration cuts at the broader account level–for accounts such as “Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy.” That setup would give the Pentagon more flexibility to decide which programs to protect and which to cut more.
The White House estimates sequestration would result in a 9.4 percent across-the-bard cut in non-exempt defense discretionary funding (Defense Daily, Sept. 17).