Capitol Hill lawmakers have been hard-pressed by the growing chorus coming from across the river at the Pentagon in recent weeks over passing a budget for 2018.
“Our message has been really clear, we need a budget. We need a budget,” Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force’s top acquisition officer, said during a breakfast at the Capitol Hill Club on Tuesday.
From Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on down the leadership line, Pentagon officials have been working the same anxious talking point into public appearances since Congress punted on an annual defense budget and passed its latest stopgap resolution in September.
Now, all eyes are on a Dec. 8 when the resolution expires.
Those leaders, who made the case to congressional committees earlier in the year for a hike, are increasingly focused on just getting a fully funded annual budget passed as the legislative calendar dwindles.
Congress has just weeks to broker an overarching deal to get rid of a $549 billion defense spending cap, or it must slash deeply into current budget proposals by President Trump and its own 2018 authorization bills.
So far, lawmakers aren’t giving any public signals of a coming deal, but Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Armed Services chairman, said work is underway.
“Sure, I’ve had numerous conversations with our leadership,” McCain told the Washington Examiner.
The Senate passed McCain’s $640 billion National Defense Authorization Act, along with another $60 billion in war funds that is not subject to the cap, in September. Formal negotiations are underway to write a final bill with the House, which passed a $631.5 billion NDAA with $64.6 billion in the war fund.
Without a deal to lift the cap, the House and Senate conference committee could produce an authorization bill by December without the power to fully fund it.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking Armed Services member, told the Washington Examiner he had not seen the type of bicameral and bipartisan discussions among lawmakers and the White House that would typically lead to a deal.
“I haven’t even seen those types of serious discussions,” Reed said. “It might be above my paygrade as they used to say in the military, but I think those discussions have to start immediately.”
Since the Budget Control Act of 2011 became law, Congress has made two multi-year deals to lift caps imposed by the act, but not by the top-line dollar amounts now proposed in the NDAA bills. The last budget deal was in 2015.
“It would help us immensely on the authorization side if we had a realistic [dollar] number, and we know we’ve got to grow the military, but we have to have that number,” Reed said.
Trump also has called for a big increase above the cap with his $603 billion base defense budget for 2018, and that too hangs in the balance on Capitol Hill.
“My sense is that nobody is confident about where this winds up or how much extra money they get,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The Pentagon has reason to worry about getting an annual budget. Last year, it started the fiscal year under a continuing resolution; before Christmas, Congress passed another CR — at the behest of Trump, according to Republicans — that lasted into April.
The CRs, which hamstring the military on its new spending and planning, have drawn increasing fire from the military. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson recently called them the “greatest risk” to the service. Chief Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White notes that over the past decade the military has operated under CRs for over 1,000 days.
“My guess is they [Congress] will find some way to provide the Trump request,” O’Hanlon said.
But the larger increases proposed by the House and Senate in the NDAAs are a much bigger question mark as the December deadline looms.
“I consider all bets off on that,” O’Hanlon said. “I don’t even know how to begin to handicap where this is going to end up.”
Any congressional deal is likely to hinge, like the last budget compromise, on Democrats’ demand that increases in the cap for defense must be matched with increases for non-defense spending.
“I don’t believe we should separate domestic from defense. We have to pass an entire budget,” said Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., who has sat on the Armed Services Committee for 17 years.
But there may not be time to bridge that gap and come to an overall agreement that wraps together defense and spending on Democrat-backed initiatives such as college grants, Larsen said.
“We are not going to make those difficult decisions by Dec. 8 when the CR runs out,” he said. “We will not have a clean nice package to hand everybody. It will be something, but it won’t be clean and it won’t be nice.”
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a retired Air Force brigadier general who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said he prefers the defense hike built by his committee and passed by the House and holding down domestic spending. But that it is likely not a “tenable position,” especially in the Senate where Republicans hold a slim margin.
“I think there’s going to be a compromise on the top end of our defense spending, and I don’t think the Democrats are going to get everything they want on the domestic side, and I don’t think the Republicans are going to get everything they want,” Bacon said. “I figure we are going to have to adjust somewhat, and we are going to have to get in the habit of finding that middle ground again.”
