WASHINGTON — Top democrats in the House Armed Services Committee expressed reservations Wednesday about the controversial funding scheme that anchors the committee's draft 2017 defense policy bill, but stopped short of saying they would withhold support for the bill because of it.
Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said the plan advanced by Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, to use an additional $18 billion from the wartime budget for base-budget needs and force a war-budget increase on the next presidential administration, "a very high-stakes game." Overseas Ccontingency Ooperations (OCO) funds under the bill would run out in April, which Smith in a previous statement called a "fiscal cliff."
"This bill is based on a lot of hope in what will happen next April or May," Smith said, speaking at the start of the committee's marathon markup of the bill on Wednesday. "While this is a good bill, it spends more than we have, and this is a problem we will have to wrestle with in this markup, on the floor and once we get to conference."
The draft National Defense Authorization Act hews to the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act's top-line for national security, $610 billion. With the $5 billion that the Pentagon has already allocated from OCO for base-budget needs, the total for OCO-funded base requirements would be $23 billion.
The bill must clear a series of hurdles: An HASC vote, a House floor vote and a conference with the Senate version of the bill before it faces a vote by the full Congress and the president's signature. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., has indicated ing he is considering a different way of funding defense.
Driven by concerns the White House has not adequately funded the military, the committee is proposing legislation authorizing 27,000 active-duty troops and 25,000 reservists, providing $3 billion for 14 more F/A-18E/As Super Hornets and 11 more F-35 joint strike fighters, and adding roughly $2 billion to the Navy's shipbuilding budget. The items were unwanted by the administration but requested in the services' "unfunded priorities lists."
Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the ranking Democrat on the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, said that while the bill pluses up programs under the subcommittee's jurisdiction by $6 billion, which is "good and good for the Department of Defense," she lamented that the money had mostly come from OCO's readiness accounts.
"But I have to tell you the way this is paid for is not our normal practice and disheartening as Mr. Smith spoke about," the California representative said. "In the past we have really taken an aggressive look at costs and tried to fund the things we needed, but this year unfortunately didn't happen."
Smith, Sanchez, and the top Democrat on the HASC's Readiness subcommittee, Madeleine Bordallo, each expressed dismay that Congress was not addressing the wider issue of budget caps created under the Budget Control Act and their impact on defense spending.
"I'm concerned that the short-sighted funding gimmick of shifting OCO funding to pay for base requirements may leave our troops short of funding in the near future," said Bordallo, a Guam delegate. "It's quite the gamble given that we have no commitment future actions will be taken and we still haven't dealt with the fundamental funding problem that faces this committee and this Congress."
Thornberry, in response to Bordallo, noted that the Democrat-led Congress in 2008 made a similar move with a supplemental passed in the first months of the Obama administration.
"If the new administration makes a new supplemental request, it is not constrained by the Budget Control Act," Thornberry said. "We need to fix the Budget Control Act, but none of that stops us from funding troops in the field."
Email: jgould@defensenews.com
Twitter: @ReporterJoe
Joe Gould was the senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry. He had previously served as Congress reporter.
