The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) chairman joined Republicans in blasting a Democratic proposal to stop “sequestration” cuts unveiled late last week, before Congress recessed for a week as the March 1 start date for the spending reductions looms.
HASC Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) said he could not accept the $27.5 billion in multi-year defense cuts in the Senate Democrats’ proposal. Unveiled Feb. 14, their plan would replace sequestration–decade-long cuts to defense and non-defense spending–until January 2014 with $110 billion worth of spending cuts and new tax revenues. Sequestration would tap $46 billion from the Pentagon from March to October alone (Defense Daily, Feb. 15).
McKeon, talking to reporters on Feb. 15, hours before the House recessed until Feb. 25, delivered a message in line with what House Republican leaders have been saying. He wants to stop sequestration by reducing mandatory government spending, not through more defense cuts or new revenues. And he’s willing to allow the sequestration cuts to kick in next month so lawmakers see the reductions’ dire impacts and are compelled to make hard political decisions to stop them.
“I think it’s going to happen,” McKeon said about sequestration’s start. “Both sides are locked into positions that we can’t seem to get away from, and so I think we’re going to be forced into it.”
He said he doesn’t think most the public truly understands what sequestration would do to military and domestic spending. But if the cuts start, he predicted, people and their lawmakers will learn.
“I think I understand probably more than any (lawmakers) what the defense implications are,” McKeon said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. “And there are others that are going to learn a whole lot about the domestic side of it, when people start hearing from their schools and from their local government and from all the agencies that are going to be cut….As the temperature rises, that hopefully will force us to come to some kind of table where we sit around and try to fix this thing.”
The Senate Democrats’ plan, dubbed the American Family Economic Protection Act, is seen as a so-called messaging bill that stakes out where they stand in the debate over crafting a deficit-reduction package to replace sequestration. Their party has resisted cuts to entitlement programs and sought to raise more tax revenue from corporations and wealthy Americans, stances at odds with Republicans.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dismissed the Democrats’ proposal, in advance of its release, as total waste of time.”
Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), a senior Senate Appropriations Committee member, said last Friday he was “disappointed that the Senate Democratic sequester package falls squarely on the backs of our defense and agriculture sectors.”
“I understand that this is a political messaging bill, and I think it’s unfair and unfortunate that the entire federal government looks to agriculture and national defense to pay for its debt,” Cochran said.
The Democratic plan would replace sequestration for this calendar year with an equal share of revenues and cuts. It calls for $27.5 billion in “responsible” defense cuts and the same amount of cuts to agricultural spending. Though the legislation would pay to stop 10 months of sequestration cuts, the replacement defense savings would be stretched out over multiple years.
“The American Family Economic Protection Act includes modest reductions in the overall level of defense spending phased in responsibly to time with the troop drawdown in Afghanistan in 2015, and continuing through 2021,” a Senate Budget Committee fact sheet says. “The reduction would be about $3 billion in Fiscal Years 2015 and 2016, and then would rise slowly to a high of about $5 billion in Fiscal Year 2021.”
McKeon told reporters he rejects more defense cuts in any plan to offset sequestration–even if they’re spread out over future years.
“Let’s go to what (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Gen. (Martin) Dempsey said two days ago: we cannot do one dollar more,” the HASC chairman said last Friday. He cited the $487 billion in decade-long cuts–separate from sequestration–the Pentagon has already been hit with by the Budget Control Act of 2011.
McKeon said he sticks by legislation he reintroduced this year, to offset the first year of sequestration through reductions to the federal workforce. Yet he acknowledged there is no momentum behind it on Capitol Hill.
Asked if there is any scenario under which he could support any defense cuts or new revenues, McKeon replied: “We just did that.” The deal Democrats and Republicans struck at the end of 2012 to prevent the “fiscal cliff,” which delayed sequestration’s start from January to March, included higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans and some alternate defense cuts.
He said “before we go down that path” of defense cuts and new revenues he wants to “get back to the balanced approach” that reduces mandatory spending.
“And that’s going to take tough political action,” he said.
McKeon said he supports legislation the House Appropriations Committee is working on that would give the Pentagon a full-blown defense appropriations bill for the final months of fiscal year 2013. The Pentagon is now funded through a bare-bones continuing resolution (CR) that severely restricts its budgeting flexibility and is set to expire March 27.
He said that legislation would help the Pentagon better manage the sequestration cuts, if they indeed starts, by reprogramming funds within its coffers.
Pentagon officials have been sounding alarms about the possibility of Congress simply extending the CR for all of FY ’13. The measure keeps funding near FY ’12 levels in accounts, not allowing the Pentagon to make adjustments to them or to start new contracts and weapons production.
“The full-year appropriation doesn’t fix the whole problem, but it does help on the flexibility side,” McKeon said. “It takes off the pressure of (Pentagon officials) not knowing what’s happening next….(But) the sequestration problem will still be there, and it’s huge cuts. And that is devastating.”