That’s what many defense experts are saying about the two-year budget deal that’s being cut by congressional leaders and the White House. Byron Callan, longtime analyst for Capital Alpha Partners, which provides research to financial firms, rates the prospective deal as “defense positive.”
But this is the soft bigotry of low expectations run amok. In promoting the deal, the Senate Republican Policy Committee explains that the baseline defense budget total for 2016 will be $548 billion and $551 billion for 2017. While that’s well above the “caps” specified by the Budget Control Act – $523 billion for 2016 and $536 billion for 2017 – it’s well below what President Obama requested – $561 billion this fiscal year and $573 billion for the next.
Congressional Republicans had hoped to have their cake – increase defense – and eat it, too – by appearing to keep to the BCA caps – by shoveling a huge increase into the “overseas contingency operations” account. That’s what the administration has come to call its requests for extra “wartime” supplemental funds, and the good thing about “OCO” money is that the account doesn’t go into the BCA reckoning. To this end, the Senate’s budget resolution added $90 billion in OCO, which would have brought total defense spending up to almost $613 billion for 2016; the president had requested just $51 billion in OCO, so his total defense request was for $612 billion. If the Senate had held to this position, the Republicans could have claimed they had put a very slightly higher priority on defense than Obama, and held domestic spending down at the same time.
But Mitch McConnell has never believed in unicorns. To the surprise of no one, the budget deal now in prospect both includes substantial increases in domestic spending – Head Start still counts the same as killing ISIS – while sacrificing defense. The plan is to raise (pardon me, “amend”) the cap on the defense baseline to the $548 billion and to limit the OCO spending to just under $59 billion. Thus, the Republican Congress is actually delivering about $5 billion less in defense spending than Obama asked for.
The situation gets worse in 2017. In addition to the $573 billion in baseline defense that the president announced this past spring, he added a “placeholder” of $27 billion in OCO. But that number was sure to rise, not least because the size and pace of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will be greater than planned – we won’t be totally pulling out of Afghanistan, for example. In this two-year deal, Congress is agreeing to keep the $59 billion in OCO going through 2017, but increase the baseline to just $551 billion. Senate staffers foresee that the Pentagon will be at least $20 billion short in 2017 if the deal is adopted.
This may seem to be complex and mind-numbing stuff, but the bottom line is this: despite taking the Senate and having an expanded majority in the House, the Republican Party has signally failed to match, let alone distinguish itself from, the White House or the hard-left minority of Democrats in Congress when it comes to rebuilding America’s military strength. And despite the energetic efforts of an expanding cadre of more hawkish members – Rep Mike Turner recently rounded up 101 House Republicans, or triple the strength of the so-called “Freedom Caucus,” for a letter demanding that Congress at least match Obama’s defense request – the congressional leadership remains unmoved.
Could this deal have been worse? Easily. But that doesn’t mean this deal isn’t very bad for the U.S. military. At the beginning of this year, the world looked like an increasingly dangerous place. The events of the last 10 months – Russia’s continuing nibbling away at Ukraine, its reappearance in the Middle East, the Iran nuclear deal, China’s making of reefs into airfields in the middle of the South China Sea, and so on – have only darkened the outlook. In response, America’s lawmakers and its commander-in-chief have collaborated to delay the rebuilding of the U.S. armed forces for at least two years. It’s no wonder bipartisanship has gotten a bad name.
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