The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee said Wednesday that any boost to military readiness funding must be offset by cuts, and not by relying on a gridlocked, partisan Congress to pass a new bill just four months after taking office.
The House-passed National Defense Authorization Act takes $18 billion from the war chest and puts it toward base priorities, meaning the overseas contingency operations account will run out of money in April. Supporters of this plan say it’ll be up to the next president to work with Congress to pass a supplemental funding bill that pays for what he or she thinks the United States’ priorities should be overseas.
But with a Republican faction of Congress that refuses to vote for any increase in spending, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said there’s no guarantee a supplemental funding bill could pass, which could leave troops stranded.
“If you are going to add some of the stuff that the House wants to add, we’re going to have to add it by making cuts elsewhere and not count on the OCO as a way to sort of dodge because I don’t think this Republican Congress is going to be willing to support more money to the OCO six months from now,” the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has said that the House-passed plan increases readiness and takes care of troops today who are getting ready to deploy without the best training and equipment possible.
But Smith said increasing funding without any way to sustain that funding is no help to service members today or in the future.
“That’s like saying, ‘I’m going to help the troops now. I’m going to give them enough gas to get out into the middle of the desert.’ You can talk to me about what’s going to happen years from now when they’re out in the middle of the desert and they have no fuel and they have no weapons and everything, but I want to help them now and right now, they need enough gas to at least get started,” Smith said.
“I don’t want to give them gas to get out into the desert so they can die, I want to actually build a sustainable military.”
Smith said a better plan is the one used by the Senate defense appropriations bill, which adds about $15 billion to the base budget, but offsets it with a series of cuts.
Some analysts have predicted that this major discrepancy, as well as a tight timeline in an election year, could push a final bill until later in the year, but Smith said lawmakers are still striving to have a bill complete by Oct. 1. It’s “a novel thought,” he said.
Smith also said that even though lawmakers will not be in D.C. for most of the rest of the year between summer break and time campaigning in home districts, staff will be hard at work through July and August trying to reconcile the two bills.
While the funding mechanism is the biggest hurdle to overcome for conferees, there are lots of other differences that will need to be resolved where the Senate tackled reform efforts far more aggressively, Smith said.
He said he would like to see a final bill that includes meaningful acquisition and Goldwater Nichols reform, but one that also incorporates some long-term savings. He also said the final bill must match the Pentagon’s requested troop levels, not the higher number supported by some in Congress, since adding troops now could result in slashes later if sequestration cuts come back in full force.
The Senate bill contains some radical changes, including asking geographic combatant commands to look at ways to organize other than by geography. While Smith said he is “intrigued” by that solution to give commanders more flexibility, he doesn’t believe the Senate bill has it exactly right.
The Senate bill would also cut the Pentagon’s top acquisition job and replace it with two positions, one focusing on business and one focusing on innovation. Smith said he is eager to hear Sen. John McCain’s argument for why that’s a good move, but that at first glance, “that doesn’t make sense to me.”
