CSBA in the News

Civilian employees will be among the first to feel the belt-tightening as the Defense Department prepares for the likelihood of severe budget reductions this year/…/

Sequestration, as written, would certainly be a mess. But it might be survivable/…/

“The budget challenges Panetta faced when he came in are largely the same, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The military’s massive health insurance program offers millions of service members, retirees and their dependents quality care at relatively low cost. That’s what the government aimed for when it created the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services in 1966, now known as TRICARE. But the price of that success has been high for Uncle Sam: The $53 billion program now consumes 10 percent of the Pentagon’s nonwar budget/…/

There’s plenty of talk about the “fiscal cliff” — which was avoided by a last-minute deal last month but that only delayed a huge Pentagon fear: Sequestration.

The spiraling cost of personnel at the Defense Department isn’t a new problem, yet a solution has been elusive. Cutting benefits for service members during more than a decade of war has been politically unpalatable. As a result, the topic has largely been pushed to the side, left to be debated by budget wonks and defense policy gurus.