In response to President Trump’s demand that the Pentagon cut defense spending by five percent next year, the Defense Department is preparing two budgets for the president to review, a $733 billion option, and a scaled-down $700 billion choice.
Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told reporters Thursday that no sooner had the Pentagon finished a draft of the bigger budget plan than Trump announced at a cabinet meeting he wanted the topline closer to $700 billion — a 2.2 percent cut from the current year’s spending plan of $716 billion.
“Since that point in time, we’ve been doing that exercise to come back to him and answer his directive, which was, ‘Show me what a $700 billion budget looks like.’”
[Read more: Sen. Jim Inhofe signals he will oppose Trump’s move to cut defense spending]
Shanahan says each of the individual military services has until Monday to submit proposed cuts to bring the budget down to the $700 billion mark, and then a team led by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will present the options to the president in late November or early December.
Shanahan says the $733 billion budget was designed to fully implement the National Defense Strategy announced by the Pentagon in January, which shifted department’s primary focus from combating terrorism to countering Russia and China.
A pared-down Pentagon budget would slow down the pace of modernization and reduce the number of new weapons systems the Pentagon can purchase in any one year.
The push by Trump to cut defense spending comes as a new congressionally-mandated commission criticized the Pentagon for moving too slowly to implement the new strategy.
“The Commission assesses unequivocally that the NDS is not adequately resourced,” said the report issued Wednesday. “[A]vailable resources are clearly insufficient to fulfill the strategy’s ambitious goals, including that of ensuring that DOD can defeat a major-power adversary while deterring other enemies simultaneously.”
Shanahan said the purpose of preparing the $700 billion budget is to show the president the trade-offs involved in cutting military spending.
“What I want the president to understand when we bring forward is what are those trade-offs. So he has an informed position,” Shanahan said.
“With a $700 billion budget, you either a reduced capacity, lower quantities of procurement, or slower modernization,” Shanahan said. “So those are the things that he needs to have — an awareness of what that number really translates to in terms of performance here for the department.”
