Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said Tuesday supplemental funding from Congress would be “very helpful” to ensure continued support for Ukraine in light of the debt ceiling agreement’s defense spending caps.
“It would be a help if our friends in Congress can come to some sort of agreement on whether a supplemental is going to be doable under the debt ceiling agreement,” she told reporters. “Like all good defense officials, I do not speculate on hypotheticals.”
The debt ceiling agreement President Biden signed into law earlier this month locks in an $886 billion defense topline, the level requested in the president’s budget for FY ‘24 and authorizes a one percent increase in FY ‘25 to the defense and nondefense toplines.
Senate leadership has offered a commitment to keep open the possibility for supplemental funding measures to add a defense boost, noting the debt ceiling bill does not block the use of emergency spending measures to address security-related items (Defense Daily, June 2).
“The Republican Senators were not happy with the caps that the Republican House members had agreed to. And so they came to us and said, ‘Well, about if we need money for Ukraine? What if we need money for these things? The caps may be too low.’ We felt that the caps were too low on nondefense discretionary [spending]. So McConnell and I put out a joint statement that we would look at finding ways to fund that were really needed through emergency and other ways but also through the regular appropriations process, which was always going to go forward,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters at the time.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has pushed back on potentially using supplementals to boost defense and work around the spending caps.
Wormuth told reporters she was “certainly pleased” Congress reached an agreement to address the debt ceiling and begin working toward an appropriations process, while noting the bill will have “certainly capped” Army spending.
“I think for us in the Army, particularly given that we want to make sure that we’re not only able to continue to support Ukraine but that we also replenish our own stocks and have sufficient stocks to deal with unforeseen contingencies, that takes money. So a supplemental, I think, would be very helpful. It would be much harder to do that kind of balancing if we’re just constrained to the agreements that were…in the debt ceiling,” Wormuth said.
The Army Secretary added that the supplementals Congress has passed over the last year since Russia’s invasion have “been very important” to the Pentagon’s efforts supporting Ukraine with security assistance.
Ukraine security assistance packages to date have included drawing thousands of munitions and weapons from Army inventories, with the service working to boost production line capacity to ensure it has equipment stockpiles to meet requirements.