The House Armed Services Committee on Monday released its roughly $895 billion draft version of the next defense policy bill, to include authorizing $849.8 billion for the Pentagon, adhering to the one percent spending cap from last year’s debt limit deal.
HASC Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) had signaled his panel would put forth a National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025 that supported a topline at the “hand dealt to us” by last year’s Fiscal Responsibility Act
and put forth in the Pentagon’s budget request, while efforts to boost funding levels are likely to follow in the committee’s upcoming markup.
“The one percent increase it proposes is entirely inadequate. It’s actually a two percent cut when you factor in inflation. But this is the hand dealt to us by the Fiscal Responsibility Act. As we move into markup of the FY ‘25 NDAA, we will play the hand dealt to us. But we all need to understand the risk to our national security that this level of investment presents,” Rogers said during an April 30 HASC hearing.
The annual NDAA, which is set to be considered by HASC before the end of May, sets policies and directives while congressional appropriators will ultimately set final funding levels.
The draft chairman’s mark HASC’s FY ‘25 NDAA authorizes $163.45 billion for defense procurement, down slightly from $166.38 billion in the budget request.
For research and development, HASC’s draft of the NDAA supports $143.27 billion, a slight uptick from the $143.16 billion the Pentagon’s budget submission.
Last year’s debt limit deal and the Fiscal Responsibility Act locked in a one percent increase in FY ‘25 for defense and non-defense toplines.
The Pentagon in March rolled out its $849.8 billion FY ‘25 budget submission, with the topline adhering to the spending cap, while department officials noted that figure is about $10 billion below the originally projected topline (Defense Daily, March 11).
“We must restore American deterrence, but to do so we need a budget that will enable us to do that. We need a budget that supports the rapid modernization of our military, a budget that fully funds readiness to ensure we can fight tonight and a budget that will improve the quality of life of our service members so we can recruit and retain the most lethal fighting force on the planet. Unfortunately, this budget [request] doesn’t achieve those goals,” Rogers said during the April 30 hearing.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the Senate’s top defense appropriator, said last week the Pentagon will require a “bigger number” for its FY ‘25 topline than the nearly $850 billion requested and cautioned the imposed spending cap could hinder modernization efforts (Defense Daily, May 8).
“The [Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee] Ranking Member [Susan] Collins (R-Maine) and myself think we need a bigger number. And the reason for that, and you know this better than I, is because if we’re going to invest in future technologies, this number has to be bigger,” Tester, the panel’s chair, said during a hearing.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Senate appropriators last week the budget constraints led the department to make “tough decisions,” to include focusing on modernization efforts that could produce near-term results over projects that may not come to fruition until the 2030s.
“To meet the [spending] caps approved by Congress, we had to make some tough but responsible choices, and we prioritized near-term readiness…We decided not to invest in some modernization that would not deliver results before 2030 and we invested in our people and our families,” Austin said during the hearing. “Because we did accept some risk in modernization for the outyears, we’ll need to have a growth in the topline in the outyears to ensure that we can recapture some of the things that we weren’t able to get into this budget.”