A Republican-led defense panel in Congress is set to vote on a proposed budget that ignores bipartisan pleas to protect the military’s long-term solvency by shrinking the workforce, closing bases and limiting troop pay raises/.../
Like the White House’s, the House panel’s spending plan assumes Republicans and Democrats will reach a deal to avoid the automatic budget cuts, even though the parties remain at an impasse over taxes and spending. Defense Department officials have begun planning for scenarios in which the spending reductions continue into next year.
Even if the cuts were somehow avoided, the Pentagon needs to make significant changes to avoid bankrupting key areas of the budget, according to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and one of the letter’s 25 signatories.
If personnel, operation and maintenance costs keep rising, they may consume the “entire defense budget” by 2024, leaving no funding for weapons procurement, military construction or family housing, he wrote in a budget briefing from April.