The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday set an overall defense funding level for fiscal year 2017 that provides a small increase over the levels set by last year’s budget agreement.
The 302(b) allocations put forward by the committee specify a $516 billion base defense budget and $59 billion for the wartime spending account, also known as Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). The approval of the allocation allows the subcommittees to begin marking up the fiscal ’17 budget to that spending level.
While OCO funds are the same as the figure reached in the budget deal, the committee allocated $2 billion more for defense than what was initially agreed upon in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, which specified a $514 billion base.
That 0.3 percent increase is unlikely to have much of an effect on investors, Capital Alpha partners said in a report released Thursday.
“It might provide a small amount of headroom to add back funds to some weapons programs that were trimmed in FY ’17 from last year’s plan,” the consultancy group said in a report released Thursday. “Congress could also allocate more funding for readiness than weapons, given the concerns senior DoD leadership has expressed during posture hearings in 2016.”
The increase is also much less than the numbers proposed by defense hawks on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, who have called for tens of billions of dollars more for ongoing operations in the Middle East and Europe. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), for example, has said the president’s budget request shortchanges the Defense Department by about $18 billion (Defense Daily, March 15).
According to a news release put out by the Senate Appropriations Committee majority, the allocations are consistent with the budget deal, however “budgetary adjustments include increased expenses to safeguard the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.”
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, called the allocations “fair, but snug” during a hearing earlier in the morning.
The defense spending levels put forward by the appropriations committee do not directly correlate with the figures requested in the Pentagon’s own $583 billion budget request, which calls for $524 billion in base expenditures and $59 billion for OCO.
Congressional appropriators include in their defense budget most Defense Department expenditures along with some spending by the departments of energy and homeland security, but do not include military construction spending that is part of the department’s own budget request.