Congress isn’t in a hurry to pass a defense spending bill for next year, even though only one month is left in fiscal 2014.
Though defense spending is one of the most important items on a crowded legislative calendar as lawmakers return Monday for their last three-week work period before the November elections, they aren’t likely to act on either the House-passed spending bill or the Senate version approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee, congressional aides said. What’s more likely is lawmakers passing a continuing resolution that would keep spending at current levels through mid-December — after the November elections for a new Congress.
Beyond that, aides said, Democrats prefer a government-wide omnibus spending bill while Republicans want a return to regular order, in which the 12 regular spending bills are enacted into law. Seven of those bills — including defense — have already passed the House.
Another continuing resolution “should not be that big of an obstruction” if Congress later resolves those differences and passes a full-year appropriations bill, said Todd Harrison, a budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. But it would come after years of uncertainty prompted by political fights over spending — Congress hasn’t passed a regular, full-year defense spending bill on time since September 2006.
One of the biggest fights is over sequestration, a debt-reduction measure designed to shave about $50 billion a year from defense spending through 2021. The budget deal worked out in December reversed $31.5 billion of that cut for fiscal 2015 by extending sequestration savings through 2023.
Former Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale, who retired in June, complained for years about the budget uncertainty from both sequestration and the partisan bickering over spending, calling it “a Groundhog Day approach to budgeting” because the Pentagon could not start new programs without new authorizations.
“In this crazy period of time, the enormous budget uncertainty is taking its toll,” Hale said. “Planning gets replaced by planning, and we don’t know where we’re headed. We don’t do well under any particular plan,” he said last year.
There is pressure to reverse the mandatory spending reduction for fiscal 2016 amid concerns that international crises such as the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria —which has brought U.S. troops back to Iraq — will require more money.
The Pentagon says current operations in Iraq are costing an average of $7.5 million a day, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey both have suggested that the budget may have to be reshaped if the fight against ISIS continues or escalates, as it’s likely to do.
“I think we’re fine for fiscal year ’14 and we’ll have to continue to gather the data and see what it does to us in ’15,” Dempsey said at an Aug. 21 news conference.
The House-passed fiscal 2015 spending bill, which the White House opposes, would provide $79.4 billion in war spending on top of $491 billion in discretionary funding, an increase of $4.1 billion from fiscal 2014, and $200 million more than President Obama asked for.
The Senate bill tracks more closely with Obama’s request, providing $489.6 billion in discretionary spending and $59.7 billion in war spending.
One of the major differences between the two measures is military pay, an issue that has been controversial. The House voted to give troops a 1.8 percent raise in fiscal 2015 — nearly twice the 1 percent requested by the president and supported by the Senate. The president’s request also included other items designed to save on personnel costs in a tight budget era, such as smaller allowances for housing and increased cost-sharing for retirees in the military health care plan, which may prove too hot politically for lawmakers.
