The nominees to head the Navy and the Marine Corps warned the Senate Tuesday that failing to secure a proper defense budget would have a devastating effect on the ability of both services to operate in the future.
Congress has until Oct. 1 to come up with a defense budget for fiscal 2020. If it doesn’t, the body will have to pass a temporary continuing resolution or return to strict spending caps put in place by 2013’s Budget Control Act. Both situations would harm the Navy and Marine Corps, according to the nominees.
“If it is a continuing resolution … commanders below us have to make hard decisions on what’s in their training plan, and they’ll have to probably delay some of those or cancel them,” Gen. David Berger said during his confirmation hearing to become Marine Corps commandant. “Procurements are going to be delayed, new starts you can’t do under a continuing resolution, and the worst part for us is the unpredictability.”
Because the services never know how long a continuing resolution will last, they are forced to make do with the funding they have to maintain the status quo. “But what really happens is an erosion of readiness, and in jeopardy is procurement,” said Berger. A return to Budget Control Act caps would be “even more catastrophic,” he added.
Adm. Bill Moran, the nominee for chief of naval operations, echoed Berger’s concerns at the joint nomination hearing. For a capital-intensive force such as the Navy, uncertain funding can jeopardize contracts with vendors on large ships.
“They need stability. They need predictability to be efficient, to hire appropriately,” Moran said. He added that the ability to maintain equipment is also affected by continuing resolutions and the Budget Control Act.
The Budget Control Act places mandatory cuts on defense, also known as sequestration, to reduce spending when a budget agreement can’t be reached. Congress avoided a return to sequestration last year when it passed a two-year budget deal.
“The last bipartisan two-year budget deal that covered 2018 and 2019 essentially reset defense spending to pre-Budget Control Act levels, allowing the military to halt the death spiral of readiness,” said Rick Berger, a research fellow with the American Enterprise Institute and a former Senate Budget Committee staffer. “That infusion of cash tied a tourniquet around the bleeding, but full readiness won’t be recovered until the early 2020s even with adequate funding, according to the military service chiefs.”
But the deadline for the next fiscal year is fast approaching, and senators from both parties worry that a budget may not be passed in time. Georgia Republican David Perdue warned that Congress had 34 working days to avoid another crisis.
“We’re staring down the barrel of a gun right now, this year,” said Perdue. “For the last two years, we’ve been able to avoid continuing resolution. I think that has played some significant role in your ability to recover on the readiness front. However … I believe we can lose a lot of that momentum just this year if we are not able to fund by Sept. 30 and we do a CR.”
Perdue noted that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill of extended a continuing resolution through next year’s election. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought suggested Monday that the president may be interested in signing a full-year continuing resolution.
“It’s almost hard to find the adjectives to describe how devastating this would be,” said AEI’s Berger. “Forget about implementing the National Defense Strategy and trying to catch up with Russia and China. We’d be dead in the water. We might as well light all the 2018 and 2019 readiness recovery funding on fire if we do a full-year CR.”
Or as Moran said at the hearing: “Sir, we don’t even like talking about it, it’s so devastating to our ability to plan and program and have predictable outcomes in the future.”
