President Trump’s proposed $54 billion boost in defense spending isn’t nearly enough to pay for the military build up he promised during the campaign, analysts said on Wednesday.
Leading up to the election, Trump promised that he would build up the Navy to 350 ships, and grow the size of both the active-duty Army and Marine Corps. Michael O’Hanlon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution, said taken together, the plans amounted to a 10 to 15 percent increase in force structure.
It would take a 7 to 12 percent increase in the defense base budget to pay for that kind of build up, O’Hanlon said. But Trump’s $54 billion increase, despite his touting it as a big boost, is only about 3 percent above President Obama’s fiscal 2018 spending plan from his future year’s defense plan.
“In other words, the money’s not there,” O’Hanlon said at event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. “The Trump plans don’t connect.”
Trump has proposed a $603 billion base defense budget for fiscal 2018, which is a $54 billion increase over the Budget Control Act caps. It’s not yet clear how much he will request for the overseas contingency operations account, which is supposed to fund military operations around the world, although critics say this account has become a slush fund for other spending priorities since it is not subject to the caps.
Trump has proposed paying for this $54 billion increase with cuts to domestic spending, but lawmakers and analysts agree a budget proposing this is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. While many Democrats do support the increase in defense spending, the party has previously said it can only accept a defense increase if there is a comparable increase for non-defense. Cutting non-defense is a “non-starter,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute.
“We’re throwing fuel on the same old fights of the last administration,” she said.
O’Hanlon said the continuing the misuse of OCO is better than offsetting the increase to defense spending with $54 billion worth of cuts to non-defense spending, including the Coast Guard and State Department.
While he was in Congress, Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney was a vocal opponent of OCO, but experts agreed that his viewpoints are unlikely to impact the use of the war chest for base priorities in the fiscal 2018 budget request.
Roger Zakheim, a visiting fellow at AEI, said he expects the fiscal 2018 OCO to be “less disciplined and larger” than in past years, since extra money can be tucked in there to avoid conflict that could lead to another continuing resolution or a government shutdown.
“I think OCO is for sure going to be used here,” Zakheim said. “If Paul Ryan can put out fires by saying we’re just going to put a bunch of this into the OCO… he’s probably going to take that deal.”
