CSBA in the News

The U.S. Defense Department will begin a “comprehensive review” to find $400 billion in spending cuts as part of President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce the federal deficit/…/Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which studies defense expenditures and national security strategy, said reaching that level of savings will require “more than just efficiencies.”“It will require making hard choices about force structure, pay, benefits and modernization programs,” Harrison said. “There are no magic bullets.”

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The early skirmishes on the long-term budget debate have been about trimming entitlement programs, like Medicare and Social Security. More quietly, but just as importantly, some Republicans have broached cutting defense/…/”There is a growing divide between the defense hawks and the fiscal hawks (among Republicans), and it is a matter of prioritization,” said Todd Harrison, a senior defense budget fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “Which do you think is a higher priority right now? Getting our budget in balance or funding defense?”Harrison said that “any real, serious plan to reduce the deficit is going to have to spread the cuts across all the big programs in the federal government, and look at the revenue side.”

The U.S. House Republican 2012 budget proposal represents the ceiling for talks on national security spending next year even as it leaves the Obama administration’s original $671 billion request intact, analysts and lawmakers said. The proposal, unveiled by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin yesterday, provides $553.1 billion for regular Defense Department operations and $117.8 billion for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq for fiscal year 2012, which begins Oct. 1. “That is about the most defense is going to get,” said Todd Harrison, an analyst with the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.  Harrison said that Ryan’s budget blueprint and the Pentagon’s request for 2012 will be the “high water mark” in the debate over government spending and reducing the deficit/…/CSBA’s Harrison said he does not see any “substantial” cuts to defense in 2012. Defense is more likely to be on the “chopping block” later in the decade, starting with the 2014 budget, the first budget to be proposed after next year’s presidential election, Harrison said. “Later in the decade the situation could be substantially different,” he said.