President Trump may get a close look this week at how his defense cuts will affect the military.
The Pentagon plans to hand over a new budget ordered up by the president at the last minute that will slash $33 billion from its projected spending next year. The revised plan is likely to drain money from the purchase of new, more modern weapons and development of cutting-edge technology, such as hypersonic missiles.
“What I want the president to understand when we bring forward this budget is: what are those tradeoffs?” Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan said.
The Pentagon can’t rely on the incoming Democratic House majority to bail it out, either.
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who is expected to be named chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, believes continuing the trend of increasing military budgets is unsustainable in the face of Republican tax cuts and ballooning annual deficits.
Could Trump and House Democrats hand the Pentagon a smaller budget in 2019? That will depend on Congress striking a new deal to lift federal budget caps, said Seamus Daniels, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Trump has ordered the Pentagon to cut the $733 billion defense budget down to $700 billion. The first order of business for Congress will be dealing with the Budget Control Act spending limits going back into effect next year.
The caps could impose cuts across the federal government, and drain $71 billion from the defense budget specifically, unless lawmakers come together (as they have in the past) on a two-year deal to raise those limits into 2022.
Past deals have set equal increases for defense and nondefense spending.
However, the last round of BCA wrangling ended in a lopsided victory. Republicans won a $185 billion increase in the defense cap and Democrats in the minority walked away with just $131 billion in new domestic spending.
Now that Democrats are in the majority in the House, they’re expected to push for an equal increase in the BCA caps for the nondefense side in the upcoming fight, Daniels said.
But that equivalence means a defense-spending cut will likely be matched by a spending cut for Democrats’ priorities.
“It’s not in Democrats interests to push for a decrease in defense spending when that could, at the same time, lower the potential increase that they get for nondefense spending above the cap levels,” Daniels said. “Democrats and Republicans could easily make a deal where defense spending is more than [Trump’s] $700 billion top line and that would be in the interest of both parties because nondefense spending would also increase more.”
A lot of bargaining remains to be done.
Smith has said the number should probably be less than this year’s $716 billion total defense budget.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the original $733 billion Pentagon budget should be a floor and not a ceiling, sending a clear message that his committee will stand by the military’s preferred budget.
As the two parties stake out negotiating positions, and potentially meet somewhere in the middle, Trump may have already shot Republicans in the foot and given Democrats an advantage.
The president made the announcement of the 5 percent budget cut in an offhand remark at the White House last month, sending the Pentagon scrambling for a rewrite after 10 months of work on the $733 billion budget. It also came months before the administration is slated to deliver its budget proposal to Congress in February.
“From a bargaining perspective, it seems to me that it might’ve made more sense for the administration to hold off on the announcement of that cut from before the election because then they could have granted it to the Democrats afterwards, but now they’ve already played that card,” said Travis Sharp, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Sharp compared Trump’s surprise announcement of the defense budget cut to flubbing arms-control negotiations with the Russians.
“If you declare before you even go to the negotiation, we’re going to unilaterally cut our nuclear weapons force by 500 missiles, then you can’t then offer that up to the Russians as some part of the bargaining process,” he said. “They’re just going to say, ‘No, you decided to do that on your own. That has nothing to do with us.’”
