A growing number of analysts and lawmakers are saying the chances are good that across-the-board cuts will kick in at the Pentagon in March, at least for a brief period, as Congress sorts through other fiscal uncertainties.
Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle–including Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)–said last week that “sequestration” will start in March 1 if Democrats and Republicans remain at odds over how to reduce the federal deficit.
Congressional observers said they sense a shift in rhetoric on Capitol Hill, where they said some lawmakers seem resigned to allow the sequestration reductions–of $1.2 trillion to longterm defense and non-defense spending–to start in less than five weeks. That’s because Congress faces a slew of other matters, including crafting a potentially broader deficit-reducing plan and addressing the fiscal year 2013 federal budget–which includes Pentagon funding–after a temporary continuing resolution (CR) expires March 27.
The sequestration cuts were created by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which said if a special committee of lawmakers failed to craft a deficit-reducing plan, as it did, the politically unpopular cuts would start this month. Congress and the White House agreed in the beginning of the month to delay the start of sequestration until March. However, since the House and Senate kicked off the 113th Congress and got back to work in recent week, lawmakers’ previously-zealous cries for preventing sequestration have notably died down.
And key decision-makers have made blunt assertions about sequestration starting. “It’s going to happen,” Durbin told reporters last Wednesday, for example.
“I’m not a vote counter, but I don’t see the votes” for stopping sequestration, said David Berteau, the senior vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.
“Right now I think it’s about 70 percent likely that we start (with sequestration) on March 1,” Berteau told Defense Daily last Friday. “But I do believe that by the time we wrap the CR in there may be some retrenchment from that.”
He predicted that if sequestration does start, that lawmakers could try to offset some of the defense cuts within whatever funding scheme they choose to employ for the remainder of FY ’13, after the current CR expires; that could be an extension of the CR or more-specific appropriations legislation.
The Pentagon’s share of the sequestration cuts for FY ’13, which ends Sept. 30, would be roughly $45 billion.
Berteau noted that dollar figure is small compared to those tied to other fiscal matters lawmakers are weighing, which include the nation’s debt ceiling. The House passed a bill last Wednesday that would temporarily suspend the nation’s debt limit until May 19 and also compel each chamber to pass a budget resolution by April 15. The Senate and White House are expected to approve the measure, which only delays the debate over the nation’s debt limit.
Todd Harrison, the senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) think tank, said last Friday that “sequestration might really go into effect on March 1.”
Speaking at a CSIS conference on the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, Harrison said foes of defense sequestration cuts need to move beyond “hyperbole.”
“When all of these dire predictions about all of these major program cancellations, base closures, all this kinds of stuff, when it doesn’t’ happen, it erodes credibility,” Harrison said to the military-friendly audience. “So you want to focus on what the real impacts are, and the timeline for when you will actually start to see (those) impacts.”