The Pentagon is poised to run under a temporary six-month budget that boosts its funding above levels proposed by the House, Senate, and White House.
The House passed a continuing resolution (CR) yesterday, by a margin of 329-91, that will fund the Pentagon and rest of the federal government for the first half of fiscal year 2013, from Oct. 1, 2012 to March 27, 2013. The CR is generous to the Pentagon, giving it for six months the equivalent of a $519.9 billion year-long budget–which House Appropriations Committee (HAC) Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) described as being the same as current FY ’12 defense funding.
The $519.9 billion in the resolution for the military is more than the $518.1 billion in the defense appropriations bill the House passed in July and the $511.2 billion in the version of that bill the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) OK’d last month. That Senate panel’s bills stuck to spending caps in the Budget Control Act of 2011 that President Barack Obama signed into law last year.
“We maintained the current level of funding for the Department of Defense, which the Senate and White House had sought to cut,” Rogers said yesterday.
The Senate is expected to pass the CR next week.
The CR is different than similar temporary budgets Congress passed in recent years, which continued the previous fiscal year’s level of funding. The new resolution, instead, sets overall FY ’13 funding during the first six months at a rate slightly higher–0.6 percent more–than FY ’12 levels. That funding in the CR, of $1.047 trillion for the entire government, is equivalent to the FY ’13 budget cap set in the Budget Control Act.
However, the resolution does not follow the Budget Control Act’s cap for defense funding, and instead gives the Pentagon $8 billion more than the year-old law called for. Thus, the CR is a victory in regards to military funding for House Republicans over the White House and Democrats who control the Senate.
HAC Defense subcommittee Chairman C.W. “Bill” Young (R-Fla.) said House leadership decided on the $519.9 billion defense figure for the CR.
“That’s better than we thought,” Young told Defense Daily about the level of defense funding.
“We don’t do it based on dollars, though,” he added. “I’ll be honest with you: 519 (billion dollars), 520 (billion dollars), 510 (billion dollars)–that is not my issue. My issue was what are we doing with the money, and are we providing enough money to do what has to be done. I try to basically ignore the argument about numbers. I just want to know what can we do with those numbers.”
The CR, for the most part, simply funds the Pentagon without allowing it to do many things–such as start new contracts and kick off production of new weapon systems–that it can do once lawmakers pass a full-blown defense appropriations bill.
The resolution contains a few legislative provisions, including one banning the Air Force from retiring, divesting, realigning, or transferring any aircraft, and one specifically prohibiting the Pentagon from retiring C-23 Sherpa planes.
The Pentagon’s FY ’13 budget initially sought to retire or divest 163 Air National Guard and 82 Air Force Reserve aircraft over the next five years. After politicians including states’ governors blasted those cuts, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta offered to give the Air National Guard $400 million to maintain 24 additional C-130 aircraft. Lawmakers, though, have rejected all of the aircraft reductions in varied defense bills, and now the six-month CR outright prevents them.
Young said he insisted the CR include the aircraft language.
“We’re just trying to get (Air Force officials) to understand that there is a very important issue with the states, and especially the Air National Guard with their aviation capability,” Young said. “We’re not at war with the Air Force at all. But all of our governors and adjutant generals from all the states weighed in really heavy on this issue. So we thought it was a good idea to just put everything on hold temporarily to give us time to see if we can work out something that would be workable.”
The House also passed a bill, by a 223-196 vote, intended to help stop some of the so-called sequestration budget cuts. Filed by Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), the National Security and Job Protection Act calls for Obama to create a plan by Oct. 15 to stop sequestration under Republicans’ terms, and also sets up a process for working with other legislation to thwart the cuts.
The sequestration cuts are the $1.2 trillion in longterm government spending reductions–$500 billion of which would come from planned Pentagon spending–brought about by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Obama has called on Congress to agree on an alternate plan to prevent the sequestration cuts from starting next January.
West’s bill would stop most of the sequestration cuts in FY ’13 if other legislation is passed that jibes with spending parameters that House Republicans support. That setup would include $19 billion less discretionary government funding than what is called for in the Budget Control Act of 2011. The bill also removes a $546 billion cap on defense spending. Thus, according to House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), because House Republicans want to boost defense spending by $8 billion in FY ’13, West’s bill actually advocates for a full $27 billion in cuts to non-defense discretionary spending.
The White House threatened on Wednesday to veto the National Security and Job Protection Act. The Office of Management and Budget in a statement slams the bill for not adhering to the Budget Control Act and says the requirement that Obama submit a report for ending sequestration under the bill’s funding parameters is “unconstitutional.”
Lawmakers were waiting yesterday for a report Obama was supposed to send Congress last week on how the sequestration cuts, if not prevented, would be implemented. A White House spokesman said last Friday the administration will submit the report late this week (Defense Daily, Sept. 10).
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) took to the Senate floor yesterday to slam Obama for not yet submitting the report.