The budget deal released to much fanfare at a Capitol Hill press conference this week, if approved, would allow the Pentagon to breathe a sigh of relief, since it would side-step the most dire of the threatened across-the-board cuts to its bottom line/.../
But pull those provisions for a reduced COLA out, and the whole deal “starts to fall apart,” says Todd Harrison, senior fellow in Defense Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, since the cuts “are big savings for the overall federal budget.”
Growing military personnel costs are a source of considerable concern for Pentagon officials as well as lawmakers, who argue that it is fair to ask military retirees to shoulder some of the cuts, since civilian government employees – many of whom work for the Department of Defense – are being asked to do the same thing.
That said, although the Pentagon would be escaping the worst of the potential cuts, “I think the best way to describe it is ‘partial relief’ from sequester for 2014 and 2015,” Mr. Harrison says.
The sequester is the series of mandatory, across-the-board, 10 percent spending cuts – some $500 billion over 10 years – that were slated to go into effect should Congress not come to a budget deal.
In that case, the Pentagon budget could have been cut by $52 billion in fiscal year 2014 from Obama’s requested $527 billion to roughly $475 billion. But under the proposed budget deal, the Pentagon would receive $520.5 billion in 2014.
True, it is still less than the increase in spending that the Pentagon had sought. “So this is basically a ‘push’ for the DOD. They are getting the same level of funding as 2013,” Harrison says.
Yet that is something of an accomplishment in the current fiscal climate, he adds. “The new ‘increase’ is not getting a decrease.”
The budget deal is a particularly fortunate development for the Pentagon, because it essentially ignored the spending caps that would have been put in place if sequester had gone through, Harrison notes.
For that reason, “we haven’t yet seen the Pentagon’s thinking as to how they would reshape the military” given the current era of belt-tightening coupled with the coming US troop drawdown in Afghanistan.