By Emelie Rutherford
Observers trying to gauge how newly elected Tea Party candidates will impact the debate over defense spending said they expect such lawmakers to generally support a strong military while trying to make the Pentagon’s budget more efficient, if not smaller.
Some analysts said they don’t see how members of the Tea Party–the loosely-defined populist and conservative political movement that wants to dramatically cut government spending–can try to trim the federal deficit without shrinking the Department of Defense’s coffers.
“Tea Party members tend to be conservative and therefore they favor a strong defense as one of the few core constitutional responsibilities of the federal government,” defense consultant Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., told Defense Daily. “However, when they do the budgetary math, Tea Party types will discover that deficit reduction is very difficult if they try to take defense off the table.”
Thompson said if politicians leave defense spending off the table when making cuts to try to balance the federal budget, Congress would need to cut Medicare and Medicaid in half–moves that likely are not politically feasible.
The Tea Party movement itself has no clear-cut foreign-policy stance. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential nominee and one of the movement’s most prominent members, has warned against cutting the defense budget and sounded alarms about Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ calls to rethink some weapon systems.
The former Alaska governor addressed these topics during a June 27 speech in Norfolk, Va., that the media was not allowed to cover. Palin, though, wrote on her Facebook page that she said during the speech “no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny.” Yet she wrote, “We must make sure, however, that we do nothing to undermine the effectiveness of our military.”
“This administration may be willing to cut defense spending, but it’s increasing it everywhere else,” Palin wrote. “I think we should do it the other way round: cut spending in other departments–apart from defense. We should not be cutting corners on our national security.”
At the same time, Sen.-elect Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the most visible Tea Party candidates elected to Congress Nov. 2, said he wants to examine Pentagon spending. He noted, during an election-day interview on CNN’s American Morning, that clash in budget-cutting priorities between conservatives who want to cut domestic spending and liberals who want to cut military funding.
“I do believe national defense is the most important thing the federal government does, but I do think there’s waste in the military budget and I’ll be one of those to reach across the aisle to the Democrats and say, we will tackle waste throughout the length and breadth of the budget, but I think that’s the only compromise that would find enough money to balance the budget.” Paul said.
Sen.-elect Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), has long criticized defense spending. Rep. Paul joined with House Budget Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and 55 other Democrats last month in sending a letter advocating for defense cuts to President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The bipartisan commission has a Dec. 1 deadline for crafting recommendations for balancing the nation’s budget, excluding interest payments on debt, by 2015. Paul, Frank, and the 55 other lawmakers wanted to ensure Pentagon spending receives the same scrutiny non-military funding receives from the powerful commission. They argued “substantial spending cuts” can be made without threatening our national security.
A group of conservative think tanks–the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Foreign Policy Initiative–created the Defending Defense Project last month to advocate against Pentagon cuts (Defense Daily, Oct. 15).
Observers have varying views on how Tea Party members in Congress will approach the Pentagon budget.
“While the Tea Party supports the contraction of government spending in general, its spokesmen, including Sarah Palin, have not argued for reductions in defense spending in particular,” Dov Zakheim, a Pentagon comptroller under former President George W. Bush, wrote Nov. 2 in Foreign Policy magazine’s Shadow Government blog.
“On the contrary, the ongoing prosecution of the war in Afghanistan will, of necessity, call for significant levels of defense spending in the form of supplemental appropriations,” Zakheim added. “More generally, those who share the Tea Party’s views are more likely to resonate to Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’ efforts to employ defense funds more efficiently, in effect shifting them from the operations accounts to those for procurement and research while calling for modest, yet real increases in overall defense spending.”
Still, others question if Tea Party members in Congress will be strong advocates of a wide-reaching U.S. military.
“The Tea Party movement has no clear foreign policy agenda. It seems unlikely, however, that the same Tea Partyers who want the U.S. government to do less at home are anxious to do more everywhere else,” Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and John Samples, the libertarian think tank’s director of the Center for Representative Government, wrote in a Nov. 4 column for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
While the membership and definition of the Tea Party is at times disputed and in flux, some Republican lawmakers have organized around the movement’s principles. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) created a Tea Party Caucus with dozens of GOP House members in July, and Sen.-elect Paul said he will create a Tea Party caucus in the Senate next year.