If the president follows through with his promise to veto the annual defense policy bill, troops will still get paid, but the country’s national security could suffer if lawmakers are unable to reach a broader budget deal, analysts said.
The House passed the bill, which dictates policy for every aspect of the Defense Department, on Thursday with a 270-156 vote. The Senate is expected to take up the bill next week.
But even if Congress passes the bill, the president has promised to veto it over a mechanism to skirt spending caps.
The National Defense Authorization Act matches the president’s requested level of $612 billion, but does so by putting $89 billion in a war fund not subject to spending caps.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he supports the president’s promise to veto the bill over funding, noting that the war fund does not allow for multi-year budget planning and leaving the caps in place for domestic agencies is problematic for groups that work with the military, such as the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA.
Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution, said funding the military through what critics call a budget gimmick is better than vetoing the bill and forcing lawmakers to fund the Pentagon at sequestration levels through a continuing resolution. Also, the Pentagon cannot begin new programs under the resolution.
“I don’t like the veto, and the resort to a [continuing resolution], and the lower spending level implied by all that,” O’Hanlon said. “My preference would have been a Ryan-Murray style compromise or even the higher numbers with the Republican [war fund] approach.”
But fully funding the military without using the overseas contingency operations budget can’t be solved with the policy bill alone, said Justin Johnson, a senior policy analyst for defense budgets at the Heritage Foundation.
“It’s tough to see a way for Congress to redo the NDAA without having some larger budget deal,” Johnson said. “This could leave the NDAA in limbo.”
Congress has a couple options if the president sends lawmakers back to the drawing board on the bill: Reach a broader budget deal that undoes sequestration for the entire government and put the war fund money back into the base budget; or adjust the deal to slash military funding to stay under the budget caps, Johnson said.
“In theory, Congress could just redo NDAA at sequestration levels, but I don’t think there would be a lot of interest or support in doing that, even from the president,” Johnson said.
If Obama vetoes the bill, essential priorities, such as paying troops, will continue since they were included in the continuing resolution Congress passed last week that extends funding through Dec. 11.
But other national security priorities could lapse if Congress is unable to pass a bill that the president will sign on time for the first time in more than 50 years.
As an example, some prohibitions on transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay set in last year’s defense bill could expire and make it easier to send prisoners to other countries.
That doesn’t mean the doors of Gitmo will be flung open if the president doesn’t sign an NDAA, however, Johnson said. Some transfer restrictions are also included in defense appropriations or continuing resolution language and would remain as long as those bills were passed, he said.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., pointed out that the defense bill authorizes policy but does not appropriate any dollars, making it the wrong place to have a fight over the budget.
“If the president vetoes the NDAA, at this time of mounting global threats, he will be prioritizing politics and process over the security of our nation and the well-being of our armed forces,” McCain said.
But O’Hanlon said an inability to get a bill passed will not “affect the calculations of foreign adversaries too much.”
A presidential veto of the annual defense bill is rare but not unprecedented. A president has vetoed the bill four times in its more than 50-year history over different provisions including funding for Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and missile defense policy, according to House Armed Services Committee records. Most recently, Congress supported the president vetoing the bill in 2008 over the interpretation of a provision on Iraq.
In each of those examples, however, the president vetoed the bill over a specific policy issue, Johnson said.
“This would be first time vetoing for an issue unconnected to defense,” he said.
