By Emelie Rutherford
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call to freeze some Pentagon funding received a cool reception from many of her congressional colleagues yesterday.
Still, President Barack Obama’s exclusion of defense spending from a three-year halt in growing discretionary budget items–which he proposed during his State of the Union address Wednesday night–has fueled additional calls on Capitol Hill to scour the defense budget for savings.
Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Politico Wednesday that “it’s hard to make the case” to totally exclude Defense Department spending from Obama’s proposed discretionary-funding freeze. She said with “defense contracting and the rest there’s probably some room to cut back 5 percent.”
“I think that if there’s going to be a spending freeze, that it should be across the board; that is to say we all want a strong national defense, and we want to fund it…in the appropriate way,” she said. “But we’re not here to protect defense contractors.”
The House speaker further emphasized during a press conference yesterday that she wants the freeze to apply to defense contracting, not to spending tied to troops, veterans, and “our national defense.”
Pelosi cited a 2009 Government Accountability Office finding that the Pentagon’s largest weapons acquisition programs had cost overruns of $296 billion,
“I don’t think they should be exempted from the freeze,” she said. “We support our military and their families and we want them to have everything they need in battle, but we do not support an entitlement program for overruns on the part of the military contractors.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not address Pelosi’s proposal yesterday. Yet Democratic colleagues of his, including Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), said in general they do not want growth in defense spending halted.
“I think we’re in the middle of a war so it’s realistic” to exclude Pentagon funding from Obama’s proposed spending freeze, Levin told Defense Daily.
SASC member Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) told Defense Daily the Pentagon spending exclusion is appropriate considering the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the “huge investment in retooling our military.”
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a Senate Appropriations Committee member, similarly cited the ongoing wars.
“We have to be very careful about any across-the-board cuts in defense or any even any suggestions,” she told reporters. “I think the president’s wise to start with non-defense first and let’s see what we can do.”
While senators and aides acknowledged more-liberal members of Congress will likely back including Pentagon spending in the freeze, they predicted that support will not reach a critical mass. For example, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has called for some defense spending to be included.
A wide array of congressional Republicans stood by Obama’s exclusion of defense spending from his proposed spending-growth halt.
SASC Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.), Obama’s former presidential rival and a champion of trimming Pentagon budget waste, told reporters “you can’t freeze spending when you’re in two wars.”
“You can’t do that; it’s never been done in history (during) wars,” McCain said.
Still, he said there’s “plenty of room for (targeting) fraud, abuse, and waste in defense contracting, cost overruns, and all that.”
Offices for several of Pelosi’s top allies, including House Appropriations Committee (HAC) Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.), were mum on her defense talk yesterday, before Obama releases his FY ’11 budget request next Monday. The House was not in session yesterday.
HAC Ranking Member Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) said Pelosi should know freezing national defense during wartime “is totally unwise and irresponsible.”
“Yet she and other Democrat leaders are continually trying to place defense funding at the back of the line or use it political leverage to force through their own funding priorities,” Lewis said in a statement.
On the Democratic side, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) in a Fox News Channel interview yesterday said “we’re not really in a position to freeze defense spending,” because of the two wars.
Still, Smith, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Air and Land Forces subcommittee, said, “I think it’s legitimate to say, long term, in terms of getting to a fiscally responsible budget, you have to look at the size of our defense budget.”
“It’s going to be about $700 billion this year, which is probably, I think at this point, more than the whole rest of the world combined,” he said, “So we’re going to have to look at defense long-term in terms of getting the budget under control.”
Some liberal commentators have endorsed folding Pentagon funding into Obama’s proposed spending plan.
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, wrote Wednesday that freezing the base defense budget at its current level of about $532 billion “would not hinder the Pentagon’s ability to conduct the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” because they will be funded separately through a $160 billion supplemental spending measure.
“Moreover, freezing defense spending would force the Pentagon to make the hard choices it has avoided over the past decade,” wrote Korb, who served in former President Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon.
To keep the Defense Department’s baseline budget level at $532 billion, Korb proposed reducing the projected FY ’11 level for weapons development and purchases from approximately $190 billion to $170 billion. He recommended an array of cuts–to areas including missile defense funding, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter purchases, and the Virginia-class submarine production rate–and the cancellation of the MV-22 Osprey aircraft, more than two DDG-1000 destroyers, and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.