The Bipartisan Budget Agreement might not preclude a fight in fiscal year 2017 over Pentagon spending, as the chairmen of both congressional armed services committees want to see a greater investment in defense, a Senate Armed Services Committee aide said Monday.
The budget deal agreed to by Congress and the White House in October lifted the fiscal 2017 budget caps on defense from $536 billion to $551 billion and sets a limit of about $59 billion for wartime spending, giving a total $610 billion for national security.
“That’s not what I think we had hoped for. We had hoped to see more growth,” Christian Brose, SASC staff director, said during a panel discussion at the Center For Strategic and International Studies’ Global Security Forum 2015.
The budget deal authorized a greater increase to the defense spending caps in 2016 than in 2017, Brose noted, and lawmakers such as SASC Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his House counterpart, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) will likely fight to further increase the 2017 defense budget.
“The other factor that I think could pay into this in an interesting way is the election. I think you already see presidential candidates on both sides arguing for a higher defense topline,” he said.
Next year, President Barack Obama will likely submit a budget that hews closely to the budget deal, said Steve Kosiak, a former associate director for defense and international affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. However, future budgets could see the inflation of the wartime spending account, or Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), to pay for expenses usually in the base budget.
“As long as we’re making two-year or one-year deals and incrementally dealing with this, the use of OCO as a gimmick to circumvent caps and help the base is too tempting to probably avoid on some level,” he said.
The current budget deal will provide at least some level of stability for the rest of President Barack Obama’s term, but the next administration will have to grapple with another four years of financial planning under the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2011 spending levels.
Meanwhile, the Defense Department will manage several major programs of record including the development of the Ohio replacement submarine and the ramp-up of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter procurement.
“Just absorbing that, I think is going to be considerably challenging,” Brose said. “We need more money for defense.”
Brose believes that the tides are turning in favor of increased defense spending. Hawkish Democratic and Republican candidates are hoping to gain their party’s presidential nominations, and congressional lawmakers are becoming more concerned about the level of defense spending, he said.
But Kosiak warned that even a person who advocated increasing the Pentagon’s budget as a presidential candidate may back away from that position when having to draft a budget that takes into account other U.S. priorities and concerns.
“This isn’t [just] about defense, this is about the overall budget,” he said. “Do you raise taxes? … Do you scale back Social Security and Medicare?”