With a budget and a defense authorization bill finally passed by Congress during the last week of its 2013 session, House and Senate appropriators can now turn their attention to crafting a spending bill that helps the Defense Department both make up for readiness lost during sequestration and move the department forward in its acquisition and research and development –but they only have until Jan. 6 to decide how that plan would look.
The two appropriations committees face a Jan. 15 deadline to send a bill to the president for signature or else face another government shutdown. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said after a late-night Thursday vote that all 12 subcommittees would combine their work into a single omnibus bill for passage by both the House and Senate, likely in the same fashion as the compromise defense authorization bill did–crafted together by House and Senate staffers to avoid the need for a potentially lengthy conference committee process.
“Now that we have the authority and our top line, we’re going to make sure we do our allocations,” Mikulski said. “I’ve instructed the subcommittee chairmen to begin meeting with their House counterparts to negotiate an agreement on a bipartisan bill. So the staffs will be working, and even though the members won’t be here, they’ll be talking back to their members.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who sits on the defense appropriations subcommittee and chairs the energy and water subcommittee, said the goal was to negotiate with the House and reach a compromise by Jan. 6, the first day lawmakers return to Washington. They will use the language already passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee and the full House earlier this year as a framework, adjusting some areas to reach the new spending caps laid out in the Bipartisan Budget Agreement (BBA), passed by the Senate on Wednesday.
Under the BBA, which raised raised sequestration’s spending caps for this year and next year, DoD may spend $520 billion in fiscal year 2014, with an additional $93 billion allowed for Overseas Contingency Operations. The House Appropriations Committee in July had crafted a spending bill that allowed for $512 billion with $85.8 billion for OCO, and the Senate Appropriations Committee had a bill with $516 billion for DoD and $77.8 billion for OCO.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who serves on the defense subcommittee, said Thursday night that there were too many priorities to name in terms of how he hoped to see some accounts replenished or trimmed to meet this new spending cap. However, he added that what was important was the stability that is slowly being brought back to DoD.
“Obviously there will be some savings in the Department of Defense with [Secretary] Chuck Hagel, everyone knows that,” he said. “But to be able to do it so they can say, ‘okay, these are what the numbers are for the next two years or three years,’ that makes it so much easier. This stop-and -go saves no money. So it’s going to be a better budget.”
Leahy said he was confident the appropriations committees in the House and Senate could reach a good compromise to send to the president by Jan. 15.
For Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), spending priorities were a bit clearer Thursday night.
“Readiness accounts are really important because they’re been really hurt by sequestration, and I want to make sure that our men and women in uniform have the training that they need–and that has been sharply curtailed in the last year,” she said. “And second, I am very much committed to the DDG program multiyear procurement because if we can provide the $100 million for the 10th ship, that will be the most affordable destroyer ever. And we, in this time of budget constraint, should take advantage of those opportunities.”
The Navy had planned to purchase 10 destroyers in a multiyear contract to achieve substantial savings on the program, but the across-the-board nature of sequestration cuts in fiscal year 2013 made it uncertain if the Navy could find the money upfront to buy the ships even though the savings over the long-term would be significant.