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Budget Conferees Face Huge Rift Between Defense Spending Plans and Caps

An upcoming House-Senate budget conference faces a daunting task in trying to find an alternative to a $20 billion cut in national defense spending that’s set to occur in January. But that mission may face better odds than appropriators would in trying to roll back their outsize defense spending blueprints for fiscal 2014 to meet spending caps/.../

The question now is whether appropriators writing the Defense, Military Construction-VA and Energy-Water bills would make tens of billions of dollars in politically painful cuts to their own blueprints or — more likely, analysts say — just allow sequestration to bring the totals down to the cap levels.

“There would be a lot of hard decisions, a lot of broken glass on the floor,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow a the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense policy think tank. “They’d rather let sequester do the cutting for them — then their hands are clean.”