The Senate begins debate Wednesday on a massive bill setting fiscal 2016 policy for the Defense Department containing a controversial plan to shift $38 billion in funding for operations and maintenance to a war account that’s not subject to automatic budget cuts.
The bill also includes a provision that would give individual service chiefs more power over weapons-buying decisions and create other new measures to increase accountability. Reforming the acquisition process is a major concern of Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., who called the change “vital.”
Shifting money from the base budget, which is subject to sequestration, to the overseas contingency operations budget, which is not, was dubbed a “budget gimmick” by a White House official Monday. Other observers have widely panned it as a “slush fund.” Defense Secretary Ash Carter has also voiced his concerns over the method.
The White House said late Tuesday that President Obama would veto the bill.
The spending shift was written by Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress to meet the concerns of military leaders who have warned for years that sequestration cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011 are causing the readiness of U.S. forces to decline to critical levels. The White House and most congressional Democrats oppose shifting money to the war accounts, along with a handful of Republican budget hawks, saying instead that the sequestration requirement should be repealed.
But the political will to repeal it isn’t there, though a bipartisan budget deal worked out in December 2013 reversed $31.5 billion of the automatic cuts for fiscal 2015 by extending sequestration savings through 2023.
“To be clear, using [war funding] to pay for our national defense for just the next fiscal year is not my preference,” McCain said Tuesday in a speech on defense policy. “And it remains my highest priority to solve sequestration and the Budget Control Act once and for all.
“But in the absence of such an agreement, I refuse to ask the brave young Americans in our military to defend this nation with insufficient resources that would place their lives in unnecessary danger. Holding the [National Defense Authorization Act] hostage to force that solution would be a deliberate and cynical failure to meet our constitutional duty to provide for the common defense.”
McCain later told the Washington Examiner he expects “at least 200” amendments to the legislation, but doesn’t see the spending issue as a threat to passage.
“The Democrats are not going to force a motion to proceed. That means they didn’t have the votes to block it,” he said.
The House on May 15 turned back a Democratic revolt against the use of war funding for operations and maintenance and passed its version of the defense policy bill. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee, in a bipartisan voice vote, approved a bill that would formally devote $38.3 billion of the war funding account to those purposes, in spite of a White House warning that $37 billion of that spending was inappropriate.
“We have a number of serious concerns about this legislation, which would underfund these important [defense] investments in the base budget and instead rely on budget gimmicks that have been criticized by members of both parties,” White House budget director Shaun Donovan wrote in a letter Monday to House Appropriations Chairman Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky.
The House version of the appropriations bill would allot $578.6 billion for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons programs of the Energy Department, an increase of $24.4 billion from fiscal 2015 and $800 million more than President Obama had requested. It includes 88.4 billion in overseas contingency operations, roughly double the amount Obama requested.
