A Senate leader predicted yesterday Congress still could agree to stop across-the-board Pentagon cuts from starting in March, saying lawmakers could become emboldened once they receive details on how the reductions would be implemented.
The so-called sequestration cuts, of $500 billion to longterm defense plans, are widely unpopular in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Yet an increasing number of lawmakers and analysts have predicted in recent days that Democrats and Republicans won’t agree on plan to stop their implementation in March.
Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters yesterday he thinks the momentum for stopping sequestration will come back after the Pentagon and other federal agencies deliver reports to Congress on the detailed impacts sequestration will have on their plans and operations.
“And I will tell you some of the things we’re going to be told are going to be unsettling to members of Congress who stand up and chant, ‘Cut spending, cut spending,’” Durbin said at the Capitol. “And then they ought to take a look at what it means in a lot of agencies, including the Department of Defense. And then we may have a more sensible discussion about cutting spending in a responsible way.”
Durbin, who also is the new Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee chairman, predicted an “evolution” will come in lawmakers’ stances on stopping sequestration. And “the process starts with some full disclosures about what sequestration means,” he said.
Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter directed the military services in a Jan. 10 memo to make near-term reductions to prepare for sequestration and to also craft detailed plans for sequestration’s actual implementation. Those detailed documents–due to Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale in early February–will include projections on potential weapons program changes, hiring freezes, and operational reductions.
Carter said in a television interview aired Sunday that he wants to be careful to not make too many changes without knowing if sequestration actually will kick in. But the Pentagon has started to take some action, including freezing civilian hiring. Military leaders have an added layer of fiscal uncertainty because it is not clear if Congress will pass an actual defense appropriations bill this year or extend a “continuing resolution” that funds the Pentagon at nearly last year’s levels and expires March 27.
“So we…are trying to balance acting too early against acting too late,” Carter said on This Week In Defense News.
He said the Pentagon has been “planning for some time.”
“And we’ve been doing that quietly because we haven’t wanted to act as though sequestration or any of these things was either inevitable, or certainly something that we could manage with ease,” he said. “These are damaging, destructive things to do.”
The Pentagons, still, is “taking every step that we think is prudent now in the expectation that the continuing resolution might be extended to the whole year or sequester might happen,” Carter said. It is trying to ensure actions made now–such as canceling contracts for ship maintenance–are “reversible,” he said.
“Later in the year, I’m going to have to do things that are irreversible, that do irreversible harm,” such as furloughing employees and reducing military training, he said. “Obviously I don’t want to do that.”
Meanwhile, an increasing number of lawmakers have been predicting sequestration will happen, and pointing to the opposing party’s perceived intransigence during budget deliberations as the reason. To stop the sequestration cuts–which total $1.2 trillion over a decade and include non-defense spending–lawmakers likely would need to agree on an alternate deficit-cutting plan. But, while debating alternatives, Democrats have balked at cuts to entitlement programs and Republicans have resisted new government revenues.
House Budget Committee Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday that sequestration is inevitable in the current budget scenario.
“I think the sequester is going to happen because that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, we can’t lose those spending cuts,” Ryan said on NBC’s Meet the Press. He pointed to House-passed legislation, crafted by Republicans and panned by Democrats, to thwart sequestration through cuts to programs including food stamps.
“We think the sequesters will happen because the Democrats have opposed our efforts to replace those cuts with others” he said. He argued Democrats have “offered no alternatives” to sequestration. The White House, though, maintains its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal would have prevented sequestration.
Durbin, meanwhile, said he would want to see an alternate deficit-cutting plan that stops sequestration and includes new revenues. He pointed to existing deficit-reducing proposals, including one from a commission led by Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton, and Alan Simpson, a former Wyoming Republican senator.
Durbin said if the $1.2 trillion in sequestration cuts do start, he doesn’t want them made in an across-the-board manner that reduces budget accounts by a set percentage.
“If we’re going to have these spending cuts in agencies, let’s not do mindless across-the-board cuts,” he said. “Let’s do them in a thoughtful way.”
Durbin is one of the lawmakers who threw up their hands earlier in the month and predicted sequestration will start.
White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters yesterday that President Barack Obama remains opposed to sequestration, which was never intended to be implemented, calling it “bad for the economy and bad overall for the effort to reduce our deficits in a reasonable way.”
Carney had no information on any meetings about sequestration between administration and congressional officials.