Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work welcomed lawmakers back to Washington for the lame-duck session Wednesday by blasting their failure to pass a full-year spending plan for the department, saying “chaos” in the budget process is hurting national security.
“This is the fifth time in five years that Congress has been unable to do their basic business,” he said at a forum on global security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Everybody knows this, everybody sees this, everybody laments this. I’m waiting for Congress to get at it.”
Work said the breakdown of the regular budget process and the additional sequestration cuts imposed by a 2011 law aimed at reducing federal debt have created “chaos” for the Pentagon and caused military readiness to suffer.
“Make no mistake here: Constructing a coherent defense budget in this type of uncertainty is beyond the ability of even the most competent men and women,” he said.
A bill to fund the government through the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is one of the top priorities for lawmakers between now and when the new Congress convenes in January, since the current stopgap funding measure expires Dec. 11. But that’s more likely to be a giant omnibus measure that would roll funding for all departments and agencies into one bill, rather than the 12 separate funding bills that were supposed to be passed before the fiscal year began Oct. 1.
Senators also are hoping to fast-track the annual defense policy bill, which is late for the 18th straight year, and send it to President Obama by the end of the session.
The massive bill is one of the most important “must-pass” measures for Congress, especially in wartime, since it sets policy for the Pentagon and national security activities of the Department of Energy. It governs how many troops are in the armed forces, how much they are paid and what benefits they receive, which and how many weapons to buy and which to scrap, along with guiding how ongoing operations are conducted, such as the war in Afghanistan and the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Both of these measures have been tied up, as in previous years, by partisan wrangling between the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House. And neither can wait until the new Republican-controlled Congress takes over in January.
Meanwhile, the gap between what the military is expected to do and its budget continues to grow. Work said budget uncertainty has left Army brigades unready for combat, grounded Air Force planes and left Navy ships dangerously short of needed maintenance. Until budget order is restored, the Pentagon won’t even know how long it will take to fix the problem, he said.
“More budget uncertainty and sequestration is going to make the problem much worse,” he said.
Work’s concerns were echoed in a letter sent to Congress on Wednesday signed by 95 retired Navy admirals and Marine Corps generals that said both services were “underfunded and overextended.”
But fixing the problem won’t be easy. Though the rise of the Islamic State and renewed Russian aggression in eastern Europe made voters more willing to take another look at defense spending, there’s not likely to be enough political support in the new Congress to end the sequestration cuts.
And there are serious differences of opinion between lawmakers and the Pentagon on spending issues, particularly over proposed reductions in military benefits.
Noting that personnel costs are increasing faster than the rate of inflation and are “unsustainable over time,” Work said the “modest” benefits cuts proposed in the Pentagon budget are necessary to keep military readiness from slipping. But many lawmakers strongly oppose even those cuts as a breach of trust with service members.
“On the harder things there is much, much disagreement,” Work said. “And we don’t know what’s going to happen here.”
