The Defense Department has begun “some” planning for the possibility of tens of billions of dollars in cuts if Congress is unable to reach an agreement to stave off draconian spending reductions set to take effect the first week of January, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief said yesterday.
Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, told a gathering in Washington that he is hopeful the lame-duck Congress that will convene later this month following Tuesday’s election will at least be able to push back the sequestration deadline. In the meantime, the Pentagon is evaluating what it will do if sequestration cannot be averted, he said.
“We actually are starting to do some planning,” Kendall said during a luncheon hosted by National Contract Management Association.
Sequestration would strip the Pentagon of $500 billion in funding over the next 10 years under the Budget Control Act of 2011. The act requires Congress and the government to arrive at a blueprint to reduce federal spending by $1.2 trillion in the decade ahead in order to rein in the nation’s financial troubles. The absence of an agreement by Jan. 2 would trigger sequestration, an outcome the Pentagon has characterized as devastating to national security.
Senior Pentagon officials had previously insisted they’ve not been instructed by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to start contingency planning for sequestration, a position reiterated by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month (Defense Daily, Oct. 26 2012).
Kendall said planning for sequestration has proven challenging because the across the board cuts leave little room for flexibility. “The problem is that sequestration–the way the law is written–doesn’t give us an enormous amount of latitude,” he said.
Kendall, like many other observers, said the likeliest scenario is the lame-duck Congress delaying sequestration for a “few months” so the newly elected body has adequate time to resolve it as well as related issues like whether to extend former president George W. Bush’s tax cuts. Even then, there are no guarantees, he said.
“Given the way Congress has acted recently it’s kind of hard to assume that they’re actually going to do anything constructive,” he said.
Sequestration has occasionally come up during the presidential campaign, with President Barack Obama saying he wants Congress to develop an alternate plan, and challenger Mitt Romney vowing to stop the measure. Romney has gone further in saying that he would also roll back $487 billion in defense reductions over the next 10 years that were agreed to separately from sequestration.