Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said Tuesday that he aims to remove spending limits on defense next year and leave caps on all other federal funding as the political fight over the Pentagon’s top line heats up.
The Senate Armed Services chairman believes he can get fiscal conservatives on board and peel off Democrat support in the House as he angles to boost defense beyond $733 billion, even while leaving deep cuts in place on the opposition party’s nondefense priorities.
Caps under the Budget Control Act are set to snap back into place and take a $71 billion bite out of defense spending and slash the other federal spending in 2019. An exemption for defense could be added to the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which is crafted by the Armed Services Committee, Inhofe said.
“Initially, we were just wanting to avoid a BCA [cut]. At my insistence, we changed that and instead we’ll just make military exempt from the BCA because that doesn’t get your conservatives saying that they’d be opposed to this,” Inhofe said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “Most people agree that if we right now are being outgunned in many areas by China and Russian, then they are willing to spend more on military.”
The plan is likely to face fierce resistance from Democrats, who have brokered hard-fought deals in past years to raise both defense and nondefense caps, and any exemption for defense only could be a long shot on Capitol Hill after the party won the House majority in the midterm elections.
“The House members are all in districts and so we will naturally get some districts where they have a defense contractor that employs three fourths of the people in that district and so we’ll be able to pick up sum by segregating [them from the party],” Inhofe said.
President Trump will make his formal defense budget request to Congress until February. But the president has already directed the Pentagon to slash the budget plan from $733 billion down to $700 billion, which has sparked an early debate on Capitol Hill.
[Read more: Trump’s defense budget comments leave experts scratching their heads]
Lawmakers are already staking out their positions on spending, with members of Inhofe’s Armed Services Committee pushing back against the president’s 5 percent cut on Tuesday.
But Inhofe said he does not believe Trump really wants to slash spending.
“Well, I don’t think that he does. He has a lot of advisers and the advisers are looking out after his interest and trying to be consistent with his philosophy. And I suspect that his advisers don’t realize that a $733 billion budget is a zero-growth budget for 2020,” Inhofe said.
Total defense spending was $716 billion this year, and once 2 percent inflation is factored, the Pentagon’s original $733 billion plan would not mean any new money.
Inhofe called the higher amount a floor for spending and said the actual top line should be about 3-5 percent higher, which could mean tens of billions of dollars more in spending.
