Rolling out the Trump administration’s formal 2018 budget, acting Pentagon comptroller John Roth confessed that Defense secretary James Mattis “hasn’t spent one moment” looking beyond the coming budget year. But even a cursory glance at the plan makes one wonder whether he paid much attention to this year, either.
Once again, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney seems to have pulled a fast one on the Pentagon. From the draft “skinny” budget outline produced in March, it was already apparent that there would be no Trump defense buildup. But this time around, Mulvaney—previously a leading member of the deficit-obsessed Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives—has managed to weld shut the one safety valve Congress has used to mitigate the cuts mandated in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Now the funding for Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCO, is no longer an estimate of what the military’s war-related costs might be. It has become a cap, an upper limit, a fixed amount.
And while the $65 billion for OCO in 2018 specified in the Trump request might seem like a lot of money, it’s $18 billion less than the $83 billion Congress just approved for 2017. The likelihood that the pace of U.S. military operations will decrease by almost a quarter next year—stepped-up activity in the Middle East alone has already reduced overall munitions stocks to an 18-month supply—is near zero. And here’s another point of comparison: Trump’s 2018 OCO request is almost $10 billion less than the average for each year of the second Obama term.
While in Congress, Mulvaney was a die-hard opponent of OCO, repeatedly describing it as a “slush fund.” In written answers sent to the Senate for his confirmation as OMB director, he vowed to abolish the practice. And not only has he turned the 2018 estimate into a cap, but the Trump budget cuts the annual OCO forecast to just $10 billion by 2022, a figure that all but returns to pre-9/11 levels.
The biggest problem for the Pentagon is that the Trump budget approach makes it almost certain that Congress will be unable to follow a normal appropriations process—although you could almost say that continuing resolutions, threatened government shutdowns, sequestration, and last-minute “cromnibus” bills are the new normal. The combination of overall spending reductions and very deep cuts in domestic programs ensures that the Trump proposal is, as Sen. John McCain put it, “dead on arrival.”
This is something that won’t surprise Mulvaney. We’ve seen this movie before, with Mulvaney frequently playing a prominent, if secondary, role. More than likely, he is pleased with the prospect of a congressional trainwreck that will work to constrain federal spending closer to the austere levels set in the Budget Control Act. For budget hawks like Mulvaney, disrupting the Pentagon’s fiscal planning is a virtue.
However, the budget as proposed would almost certainly deal a fatal blow to the administration’s larger legislative agenda, health care and tax reform as well as any infrastructure spending and border walls. If Donald Trump wants to make America great again, Mick Mulvaney wants to make America fiscally prudent again.
The Republican leadership in Congress already had a lengthening list of reasons to distance itself from the White House, and its performance in “repealing and replacing” Obamacare has raised doubts about its ability to govern. Moreover, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have twice before negotiated budget compromises with Democrats, and the path to a deal—a combination of both defense and domestic discretionary spending increases—is plain. Indeed, many Democrats understand the need to begin to repair the military and support the higher defense spending levels outlined by McCain and his counterpart on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry. But not at the cost of further cuts to domestic programs.
Beyond the practical political gains that would come from preventing a budgetary train wreck, this is also an opportunity to reaffirm fundamental principles within Republican ranks. Neither the Trump cult of personality nor the Mulvaney cult of accountancy befits the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Reagan. Just because Secretary Mattis can’t spare a moment to plot the rebuilding of the American military doesn’t mean that Congress—the body with the ultimate constitutional responsibility in such matters—shouldn’t do so.
