By Ann Roosevelt
Friday night at midnight, if the current budget standoff is not resolved, the federal funding spigot shuts off and without those funds, soldiers in operations from Afghanistan to Africa might not get paychecks, the Army budget chief said.
“The pay that they earn and accrue through the 8th will be paid,” Lt. Gen. Edgar Stanton, military deputy for budget, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (FM&C), said yesterday at the Association of the United States Army Institute for Land Warfare. “The rules of the game are such that thereafter we cannot disburse personnel payments…once there is a (spending) bill then they’ll be paid.”
Unlike federal workers say, in Washington, who must turn off and put down office-provided Blackberries and shutdown computers on their way out the door, deployed soldiers can’t stop working.
“Those that are in real harm’s way doing what we’ve asked them to do will now, instead of being focused on the mission in hand, will be worried about what’s going on back home with their families, ” Stanton said.
“While a shutdown would be extremely disruptive to the department and those who work here, I want to underscore that we would still have the authority and the ability to continue key national security activities, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, operations in Libya, and humanitarian assistance in Japan, to name a few,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, at a Tuesday briefing.
In the budget battle between the White House and Congress, the Defense Department is one of the observers on the sidelines, while operating under the current and sixth continuing resolution (CR) that keeps federal spending at fiscal year 2010 levels and runs out Friday.
Facing the possibility of a shutdown, Morrell said, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn is working up guidelines that were to be disseminated yesterday.
Asked directly at the briefing about any suspended paychecks for those in uniform, if there is a government shutdown, Morrell said, “I think it’s premature for anyone to suggest that a determination has been made one way or the other.”
For soldiers, a downside to the federal shutdown is that like many in the civilian world, monthly direct bill payments are made from their accounts for such things as mortgages. Stanton said for many a government shutdown would mean the automatic payments would go out but there would be no money in the accounts to pay those bills.
For the Army, personnel costs are the largest slice of the pie: $60.6 billion, or 42 percent of the service’s $144.9 billion fiscal year 2012 budget request.
Historically, after a conflict where expenditures shoot up comes a trough where force structure and costs decline. The questions the service faces are how fast and how far they will come down.
On the one hand, the service works to identify efficiencies, and then “the pragmatic world over here we’re doing month to month contracting because we’re under a CR, which is totally inefficient,” Stanton said.