“Although the exact figures vary, … [key congressional committees] have all marked to a total national defense topline that is about $30 billion more than the Trump administration’s PB 2018 request,” Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said in a recent policy paper…
Without a deal to amend the BCA caps for 2018, Congress would have to increase OCO funding to $118.6 billion to reach the Trump administration’s proposed topline or to $147.5 billion to reach the topline agreed to by House lawmakers, Blakeley noted.
“Such a large increase in OCO funding may be difficult for many in Congress to swallow, particularly fiscal conservatives,” she said. “This would amount to a de facto increase in defense spending without any commensurate increases for non-defense spending, which the Democrats have pledged to oppose…”
More fiscally conservative Republicans are unlikely to accept higher non-defense spending as a compromise to achieve higher military spending, Blakeley said. “These … policy differences are likely to lead negotiators to the same impasse that has made prior BCA cap deals difficult to broker and exceedingly modest in scope.”
Trump’s proposal to exceed the cap by $54 billion would be nearly three times the average amount of negotiated sequester relief, and twice the largest amount by which Congress has previously raised the caps, she noted