By Emelie Rutherford
The Republican-controlled House is slated to debate a two-week budget extension today that would maintain the Pentagon at last year’s budget levels and prevent a government shutdown when current funding ends March 4.
This latest continuing resolution (CR)–for extending the current fiscal year 2011 federal budget at FY ’10 levels until lawmakers can agree on an actual spending plan for FY ’11– was unveiled last Friday night by the House Appropriations Committee (HAC). The House Rules Committee took it up last night, after press time.
The CR includes $4 billion in cuts compared to the FY ’10 budget, though none of the targeted items are directly related to weapon systems. The reductions include $1.24 billion in earmarked programs and projects; those include Defense Environmental Cleanup, Department of Homeland Security cyber-security-and-infrastructure, and Coast Guard shore- construction projects, according to a summary.
The Pentagon has been unable to start new contracts planned for FY ’11 since the fiscal year began Oct. 1, because an actual defense appropriations bill has not passed Congress. If the two-week CR passes, contract starts will be further delayed until at least March 18. The Defense Department and rest of the government are being funded at FY ’10 levels under a CR that expires this Friday.
HAC Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said “it is clear more time is needed” to work out a full-year FY ’11 budget plan with Democrats.
“It is my hope that this CR can be passed quickly in the next week and that the president will sign it before the March 4th deadline,” Rogers said. “It is also my hope that it will garner broad support, given the short timeframe for action and given that these spending cuts have been previously supported in a bipartisan way by members of the House and Senate, as well as the White House.”
Democrats who are the minority in the House and majority in the Senate expressed tepid support for this latest CR.
Jon Summers, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said he is “encouraged” this latest two-week CR does not have some previously proposed funding cuts to areas including border security.
“The plan Republicans are floating…sounds like a modified version of what Democrats were talking about,” Summers said.
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) also issued a statement that acknowledge and offered no criticism of the two-week CR. Still, Hoyer called for a longer-term federal- budget bill for the rest of FY ’11, which ends Sept. 30, to be void of “the extreme and arbitrary cuts” Republicans called for in the full-year spending bill that passed the House Feb. 19, which would cut President Barack Obama’s overall FY ’11 budget request by $100 billion.
Rogers said he stands by that “hard-fought and thoughtfully crafted funding legislation that the House passed,” but recognized the Senate would not support it this week as a government shutdown loomed for after Friday.
The full-year CR the House approved Feb. 19, which has a full-blown FY ’11 defense appropriations bill attached to it, calls for cutting the White House’s FY ’11 Pentagon proposal by $14.7 billion and eliminating the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s alternate engine.
The Pentagon would fare better under the legislation that passed the House Feb. 19 than under a full-year continuation of funding at FY ’10 levels. Obama’s $549 billion defense budget request for FY ’11 would be cut by $14.7 billion under the full-year House-passed bill, or would drop by $23 billion if the entire FY ’11 defense budget is funded at FY ’10 levels.