Lawmakers may be coming to an agreement to fund defense through September after a frenetic week of debate and negotiations, but any deal will only bring them out of the budgetary woods and into the political fire.
The appropriations work is a precursor to a bigger and almost certainly more difficult Capitol Hill debate, passing President Trump’s first full-year defense budget, that will play out over the coming months.
The president has made major pledges that will be heavy lifts for lawmakers, including the repeal of federal budget caps known as sequestration and “one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.”
Congress will immediately shift its attention to Trump’s $603 billion 2018 budget plan after passing the appropriations legislation that will carry the Defense Department through this fiscal year. Lawmakers passed a one-week deadline extension on Friday.
“2018 is a disaster in the making,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Trump’s plans for a military buildup could be dead in the water without Congress lifting the 2018 spending cap set to hold the defense budget at $549 billion — $54 billion below what the president proposes.
The president has called for big troop increases, new aircraft, a 350-ship Navy with 12 aircraft carriers, and modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The White House is expected to release a detail budget proposal in May.
To foot the bill, lawmakers must either rally support to totally repeal the sequester-era cap in 2018 or strike a deal to raise the limit. Otherwise, the Defense Department will be stuck with the lower $549 billion, even as military leaders have warned that years of restrained spending has left the services dangerously unprepared.
“I don’t think we’ve got 60 votes to repeal” sequestration caps in the Senate, said Graham, who indicated a deal could instead lift the cap.
A previous two-year deal by Republicans and Democrats shielded the Defense Department from the brunt of spending limits passed by Congress in 2011.
But now that deal is set to expire.
To reach another agreement on higher defense spending, Democrats will demand equal increases for domestic and non-defense programs, as they have in past debates over spending and caps.
But Trump has greatly complicated that option with his budget blueprint released in March, which calls for slashing State Department spending by 28 percent and cutting funds for public medical research and other programs backed by Democrats.
In a show of opposition, a group of 43 senators, including six Republicans, sent a letter Thursday to the chamber’s budget officials and appropriators asking them to reject the cuts in diplomacy and foreign aid because, arguing that it would hurt national security.
Graham and other leading Republicans such as Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had said the president’s budget proposal to boost defense on the back of the State Department and foreign aid is a nonstarter.
Even if lawmakers can bridge differences and broker a deal to raise caps, there is still disagreement over how much the military should get.
Defense hawks in Trump’s own party have called his “historic” military buildup proposal less than historic and are pushing for bigger boosts — a $640 billion base defense budget for 2018.
The pressure for more money could be highest from the House Armed Services Committee.
The chairman, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, has proposed the $640 billion budget along with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his committee backed $18 billion more in defense spending last year that never made it into final budget legislation.
Members were expecting to see a supplemental defense bill that would boost spending this year. Trump requested $30 billion in additional defense spending, but Congress was angling toward a smaller $15 billion increase as part of its ongoing appropriations negotiations that could wrap up on Friday.
Thornberry said if Congress does not approve enough of a boost, the committee may need to “make up some of the lost ground” with a bigger budget for 2018. The committee builds the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policy and spending priorities, along with the Senate.
“If the supplemental is less than requested, then that has implications for the ’18 bill,” he said.
