Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s vision for a bigger defense budget in a smaller federal government may be a good way to appeal to both the hawks and the budget cutters of the Republican Party as he lays the groundwork for a possible 2016 presidential run.
But that vision, outlined Monday in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, depends not only on bridging gaps within the GOP but also on rebuilding a bipartisan consensus on the U.S. role as a global superpower.
“Without a strong defense, our allies will not trust our promises and our adversaries will not trust our threats,” he said.
Jindal’s plan, released by his America Next policy think tank, calls for setting a baseline for defense spending of 4 percent of gross domestic product, streamlining the process of developing new weapons to hold down costs and aggressively working to eliminate Pentagon waste, in part by ensuring its spending can be audited. He told the audience at AEI the increased spending could be offset with reductions in entitlement spending as those programs are reformed — a key priority of the Tea Party and libertarian-leaning Republicans.
Defense spending is currently 3.5 percent of GDP, which means Jindal is calling for an annual increase of almost $100 billion in spending and cost reductions.
“Waste and fraud alone will not make up the funding gap which prevents us from having the modernized force we need,” he said. “We’ve got to fund defense first.”
Jindal is set to deliver another speech outlining his plan Tuesday at The Citadel, a military academy in the early primary state of South Carolina.
But if increasing defense spending were easy, it would already have happened, considering that polls show Americans are feeling less safe amid growing dangers from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Russian moves in eastern Europe and increasing Chinese assertiveness in the Pacific. Political support hasn’t been there to reverse the defense cuts President Obama ordered in 2011, which were written into law in the Budget Control Act that year and essentially doubled by the sequestration process after lawmakers couldn’t agree on another way to reduce federal debt.
That isn’t likely to change even if Republicans take over the Senate, because Obama would remain in office with the power to veto any attempt to repeal the budget caps. And Democrats likely would continue to protect entitlement spending, one of the reasons why an agreement to forestall sequestration never materialized.
Jindal would need a major GOP wave in 2016 to have the chance of enacting his proposals into law. But that’s also the year when Republicans will be defending many of the Senate seats it captured in the 2010 wave, including in the Democratic-leaning states of Illinois, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and the swing states of New Hampshire, Ohio and Florida.
Plus, he would have to win over Tea Party budget-cutters and libertarian-leaning Republicans who are reluctant to backtrack on the cuts made in the Budget Control Act, since it’s the only tangible achievement they have to show their supporters — and likely the only one they will have going into 2016.
Many of those lawmakers have voted to protect defense cuts against the wishes of GOP hawks and likely will continue to do so, since federal spending is expected to continue to rise through 2023, even with sequestration, erasing the modest deficit reductions produced by the 2011 law.
Meanwhile, polls have consistently shown that even a plurality of Republicans are satisfied with the current levels of defense spending. Though the most recent of those polls date from February, there has been no sign since then of a public shift in sentiment among lawmakers on the issue.
