A Senate panel approved a $511 billion defense budget yesterday that adds funds for ships, tanks and aircraft to the Pentagon’s budget proposal while supporting a controversial missile-defense program supported by the administration but opposed elsewhere in Congress.
The Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) passed its version of the fiscal year 2013 defense appropriations bill yesterday as Congress prepared to recess until the second week of September. When the House and Senate return to Washington they are expected to pass a continuing resolution (CR) that simply funds the federal government for the first half of FY ’13, from October 2012 through March 2013, without allowing many, if any, program changes. Thus, it remains to be seen how Congress will deal with the FY ’13 defense appropriations bill–a version of which has already passed the House–and how the SAC and House proposals will fare.
Changes to the Pentagon’s proposal for weapons programs, as spelled out in the FY ’13 budget it requested from Congress back in February, were not debated during the SAC’s markup of the defense appropriations bill yesterday. Committee members, instead, clashed during the bill-writing session over the bigger-picture topic of preparing for potential across-the-board Pentagon budget cuts next January.
With only a few slight changes, the SAC endorsed the bill its defense subcommittee unveiled on Tuesday. The legislation adds $1 million to the Pentagon’s budget for an additional DDG-51 destroyer and $777 million in advanced-procurement monies for the Navy to buy an additional Virginia-class submarine in FY ’14. It also rejects the Navy’s plan to retire nine ships early. The House-passed appropriations bill supports the same plan for the DDG-51 and Virginia submarine, though with a slightly lower figure for the sub. The House version also pushes back on the service’s ship retirements, but only provides funding for keeping three of the targeted cruisers. House and Senate negotiators typically hash out discrepancies between their versions of the same bill and send one iteration to the White House for the president’s signature.
The SAC’s bill rejects several additional weapons proposals from the Pentagon, including one to temporarily shutdown M1 Abrams tank production. The Senate panel calls for increasing funding for Abrams long-lead material while also boosting production of the M88A2 Hercules tank recovery vehicle. The House-passed bill also adds funding to prevent a planned delay in production of heavy vehicles.
The Pentagon’s proposal to kill the Global Hawk Block 30 surveillance drone aircraft also would be thwarted by both the SAC and House versions of the defense appropriations bill, with the Senate panel calling for using existing funding to save the unmanned spy plane. And both pieces of legislation would reject the Air Force’s controversial plan to cut Air National Guard and Air Force reserve aircraft and personnel. The SAC calls for adding more than $800 million to the Pentagon’s bill to sustain current Air Force equipment, personnel and operations.
The Senate appropriators notably call for funding the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), bucking other congressional defense panels in Congress. The United States had tried to exit the U.S.-German-Italian missile-defense program, and the effort receives no support in the House-passed defense appropriations and authorization bills and the Senate Armed Services Committee’s authorization bill, which the full Senate hasn’t debated yet.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall wrote to Inouye and SAC Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) in June urging them to support MEADS funding for FY ’13, saying they want the United States to complete a design and development phase of the missile system and honor an agreement with partners Germany and Italy.
Overall, the SAC bill calls for a $511 billion base defense budget, which jibes with spending caps in the Budget Control Act of 2011. The Pentagon funding bill the House passed July 19 does not heed those spending caps and has a topline figure of $518 billion. The Senate panel’s bill, though, notably includes a higher figure for separate war funding: $93 billion, $5 billion more than the House endorsed and the Pentagon requested. That funding is said to have been shifted from the base budget to the war funding to allow the main bill to heed the Budget Control Act limits, a move government watchdogs have criticized.
Sparks flew during the SAC’s markup session yesterday over the topic of sequestration cuts, the $500 billion reduction to planned longterm Pentagon spending that will start next January if congressional Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a different plan to cut the federal deficit.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) tried and failed to garner support for an amendment to the SAC bill that would require federal contractors to issue warnings of potential layoffs to the their employees because of the potential sequestration cuts. To the chagrin of congressional Republicans, President Barack Obama’s Labor Department said on Monday that contractors are not required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act to send out such warnings 60 days before the potential cuts–or right before the November elections. Republicans have called for defense contractors to send out the warnings to help bolster their fight to stop the sequestration cut from kicking in next January.
“I know it’s politically uncomfortable for the layoffs’ (warnings) to hit Friday before the election, but what’s even more uncomfortable for me is that this thing is moving forward and nobody’s trying to stop it, and we’re picking on the contractors,” Graham said, referring to criticism of defense firms that plan to issue the layoff warnings.
Inouye, who voted against Graham’s amendment, said Graham has been a “voice of reason” in the sequestration debate, but that his thwarted layoff-warning proposal would “provide unnecessary notification to thousands of employees of potential sequestration loss of jobs.” Inouye said planning to send the layoff notices right before the election appeared to “serve a political agenda.”