Vice President Mike Pence assured graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy Friday that the president will “always have your back.” He pointed to the administration’s recently delivered defense budget proposal, which he described as “one of the largest increases in defense spending since the days of President Ronald Reagan.”
But that reassurance does not jive with defense hawks in Congress, who have slammed the budget as inadequate and described it as only a minor increase over an Obama-era proposal.
The conflict will doubtless intensify in coming weeks as the debate over budgets turns from theoretical to mathematical. OMB Director Mick Mulvaney has described the White House budget proposals as a statement about the president’s priorities. Trump’s hawkish critics in Congress worry that Mulvaney is right, and that if he is, Trump’s priorities today are not the ones he campaigned on.
“The president’s budget increases funding for our national defense by $54 billion, provides more than 56,000 new service members, and begins to rebuild our Navy with eight new battle-force ships headed for the sea,” Pence told graduates Friday. “Let me be clear: The era of budget cuts of the Armed Forces of the United States is over.”
The defense budget request, at around $603 billion, has earned heavy condemnation from top Republican lawmakers. For one thing, as noted by Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, it falls far short of congressional recommendations.
“President Trump promised he would rebuild our military and provide them with the resources necessary to defend us against grave and growing threats,” said Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney tells TWS. “The defense budget submitted by the White House—only a 3 percent% increase over Obama’s last budget—completely fails to do that.”
Both McCain and Thornberry have offered similar criticisms in recent days.
“President Trump’s $603 billion defense budget request is inadequate to the challenges we face, illegal under current law, and part of an overall budget proposal that is dead on arrival in Congress,” McCain said in a statement.
“It’s basically the Obama approach with a little bit more,” Thornberry said during an event Monday
“The buildup is only 3 percent over Obama’s plan,” a Republican congressional aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “Their plan will not rebuild the military or even pull it out of its sequester death spiral.”
Central to congressional anxiety over the budget plan is the acquiescence to the 2011 Budget Control Act, which caps defense spending. “Ultimately, any military buildup is impossible as long as the Budget Control Act remains the law of the land,” McCain said in his statement.
The BCA expires in 2021, but the White House budget will likely maintain caps for another 10 years, according to experts.
“Not only did the president’s budget put forth a completely unrealistic plan change the legal spending limits, his ten-year plan would basically endorse the Budget Control Act model (albeit, by another name) but leave in place more constricting spending caps for the next decade,” Mackenzie Eaglen, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote Wednesday.
The BCA is a roadblock to Trump’s campaign pledges, including rebuilding the military, the GOP aide told TWS.
“The fact is, the Trump administration can’t rebuild the military because right now, it’s illegal. They have to amend or replace the Budget Control Act of 2011 in order to start a rebuild,” the aide said. “The president made 3 key promises on the campaign: rebuild the military, build a wall, and fix infrastructure. He can accomplish precisely none of those things under the BCA. So why the hell is he calling his plays off Obama’s playbook?”
