Battle Lines Drawn Over Defense Cuts
A fight looms over President Obama's plan to slow the rate of growth in defense spending.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
by Brian Friel
When Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., was asked at a press conference in February about rising government spending and the burgeoning federal debt, he took aim at the Pentagon. "We are spending more than we should, given the level of taxation that we're willing to sustain, and I think you need to address that," Frank said. "But I am insistent that we address it by taking a big chunk out of military spending going forward."
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the liberal Democratic bloc in the House, proposed just that this week, suggesting a whopping 22 percent reduction in the Defense Department's budget, largely by axing funding for various weapons systems that it views as Cold War relics. In both the House and Senate, support for such cuts is deep among liberal lawmakers, particularly after double-digit increases in the military budget under President Bush.
"We have substantially increased weapons spending and military spending in recent years," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said. "We're fighting a different type of enemy in Al Qaeda. It's not the Soviet Union, so I think it is appropriate to take a very hard look at weapons systems."
"This budget has more welfare in it than any budget in the history of this country, but it's devastating to the military." -- James Inhofe
President Obama's budget is more cautious on military spending, proposing to slow the rate of growth in the Pentagon's base budget to 4 percent in fiscal 2010. The budget resolutions that the House and Senate debated this week abided by Obama's proposal. The difference means that the billions of dollars in cuts that liberal lawmakers envision aren't on the table.
The president's budget nevertheless will require tough choices, as it will keep defense increases at just slightly above the rate of inflation for the next decade, according to the House Budget Committee. House Republicans, while proposing a $5 billion boost to Obama's fiscal 2010 defense budget, suggested the same defense spending levels in later years as the president did. The lower rate of defense growth in both the Obama and GOP budgets reflects the overall squeeze caused by rising costs in mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare that consume a greater share of federal revenues each year.
The limited defense budget will have to absorb a ramp-up in Army and Marine Corps personnel levels that the president has endorsed. It also must pay for escalating maintenance costs for equipment that is experiencing major wear and tear in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Those commitments will mean that the military services -- which have budget wish lists that come in $50 billion over Obama's $533 billion proposal for this year alone -- are likely to face cuts to prized weapons programs when congressional appropriators write their annual spending bills later this year.
"Ten years from now under this budget, we're going to spend more on servicing the interest on our national debt than we will be on our Defense Department," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. Obama has "increased domestic spending so much that something had to give, and the president chose the one thing that I think we can't afford to give, and that is our national security."
Such guns-versus-butter debates have long been a staple of congressional budget battles. Reductions in Pentagon spending at the end of the Vietnam War prompted concerns about military readiness, which led to the buildup of the 1980s. Defense spending increased to more than 6 percent of gross domestic product in the mid-1980s and then began to fall as the Cold War came to an end. By the late 1990s, defense spending hovered around 3 percent of GDP. In this decade, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars under way, it has gone back up to about 4.5 percent of GDP.
Obama's budget predicts a return of defense spending to around 3 percent of GDP in the next decade, a reduction that Republicans have pounced on. GOP lawmakers have noted that nondefense spending would grow by close to 10 percent under Obama's budget in fiscal 2010, compared with the more-modest defense increase of 4 percent. "I'm concerned that the only area where there seems to be restraint is the Department of Defense, yet the president is proposing a buildup in Afghanistan that is going to cost more money," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a senior member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is one of several Republicans who back a proposal to require that defense spending remain at or above 4 percent of GDP. Inhofe said he opposes reductions, supported by many Democrats, to weapons systems including the Army's Future Combat System and the Joint Strike Fighter and other aircraft.
"These are all things that we desperately need," Inhofe said. "We're getting a rerun of what happened in the 1990s. This budget has more welfare in it than any budget in the history of this country, but it's devastating to the military. You have to decide, Is defending America the No. 1 function? Some people don't think it is. I think it is."
Even with the 4 percent increase in the fiscal 2010 defense budget, the military will have to cut back its plans. But White House officials, including Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, have sought to distance themselves from dictating which programs should be on the chopping block, instead referring concerned lawmakers to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. As a Bush administration holdover, Gates can help take the heat off Obama and Orszag by being the primary decision maker on where cuts are made.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters this week that Gates would make a public push for some cuts, in anticipation of the certain objections from the services, the defense industry, and lawmakers whose districts and states would be affected. "It's kind of a novel approach -- sort of taking the bull by the horns," Levin said, according to a CongressDaily report.
Various weapons systems have been discussed as potential budget targets, prompting home-state lawmakers to fire off letters in opposition. The senators from Louisiana, South Dakota, and Texas, for instance, asked the president in a March 27 letter to preserve funding for the Air Force's next-generation bomber. Their states' Air Force bases could benefit from the new program.
Seven House members from six states wrote to Gates on March 23 asking him to spare the airborne laser program, arguing that cutting it could cause the "fragile industrial base that supports it" to disappear. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., one of the program's supporters, made a similar point at a House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on March 31. "Every one of us represents people who have been laid off," he said. "We want to get those jobs back." Kansans have also been among the most vocal supporters of funding for new tanker aircraft amid some calls for a delay in purchasing them.
Sanders said that Congress should be willing to set aside arguments that weapons cuts would hurt the country's industrial base. "That's called the military-industrial complex," he said. "They're very powerful. They have a whole lot of lobbyists, but if we're serious about getting a handle on this huge deficit and this huge national debt, we've got to look everywhere."
Recognizing the potential rifts between Democrats who want significant weapons-system reductions and those who support heavier Pentagon spending, the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate House Democrats has sought to thread the needle by proposing a thorough review of military spending to identify wasteful programs ripe for cutting. Such a bottom-up approach could be more successful than a top-down demand for reductions, some Democrats argue.
"I still think we have a lot of work to do internally in that budget in terms of cost control, acquisition costs, all those kinds of things," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. She is heading a new Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee that was created specifically to identify savings in the defense budget -- both in weapons systems and in service contracts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I think there are some real cost savings that could be realized."
Other lawmakers are skeptical that Congress will recoup any major cost savings from the Defense Department's procurement budget. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russell Feingold, D-Wis., for example, have made careers out of targeting wasteful military spending, but the overall procurement budget has continued to rise.
"It's always hard to do, so focus on the problem but lower your expectations about how much you're actually going to be able to squeeze out of it," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. "Ask all the previous secretaries of Defense who've come in saying we ought to be able to cut some money out of that. They're correct, but it's actually harder to realize than it is to talk about."
Michael O'Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution, said that nearly every category of military spending goes up faster than the rate of inflation. With personnel costs rising and a real need to modernize equipment, he said, some growth above the rate of inflation will be necessary. "Zero percent growth is undoable, unless you cut the size of the military," O'Hanlon said. "There is room to economize, but not enough to allow zero percent real growth."