For all the talk of the Trump military buildup, there is little prospect of the dream becoming reality anytime soon, according to a sobering analysis by Katherine Blakeley of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “National security is an afterthought in the FY 2018 President’s Budget request, playing fourth fiddle to tax cuts, cutting non-defense discretionary spending by 30 percent over a decade to a record low of 1.4 percent of GDP, and balancing the federal budget within ten years,” Blakeley writes.
“Instead of repealing the Budget Control Act caps on defense, as both Congressional Democrats and Republicans have called for, this budget would extend them six years through 2027. It does call for raising the defense caps by 2 percent annually, which would yield an additional $489 billion for national defense spending — but it offsets these raises with $1.6 trillion of deep cuts to non-defense discretionary spending that are unlikely to be enacted.”
Blakeley also takes aim at the White House proposal to phase out the overseas contingency operations account by reducing it from $60 billion in fiscal 2018 to $10 billion in fiscal 2022. “By giving with one hand and taking away with the other, the Trump administration’s PB 2018 budget would actually depress the overall level of national defense spending by $3 billion over five years — from $668 billion in 2018 to $665 billion in 2022 in current dollars.”