The House Budget Committee announced a defense budget Tuesday morning that would keep spending caps through sequestration for fiscal 2016, but almost doubled the wartime fund that is immune to spending limits.
Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., emphasized Tuesday that the House Republicans’ request — $523 billion for the Defense Department’s baseline spending and $94 billion in the overseas contingency operations fund — “spends more on defense than the president’s,” a rallying cry that both the House and Senate armed services committee chairmen had pushed heavily for.
It was not immediately clear how the House Republicans will afford the sizable boost it would provide to the $94 billion wartime spending account. The amount requested in the president’s fiscal 2016 request was $50 billion.
Price said, when asked by the Washington Examiner, that the committee is still working with its defense colleagues in the House and Senate to determine what offsets or revenues could be identified to pay for the additional spending.
