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President Trump’s FY 2018 defense budget promises a “historic” defense buildup. At $603 billion in the base national defense budget, some $54 billion over the Budget Control Act caps, it grows the size of military slightly and boosts RDT&E efforts, but doesn’t move the needle on procurement. Does the FY 2018 budget request build the military the U.S. needs? Will Congress succeed in funding more for defense?
2018 defense spending is capped at $549 billion. The White House requested $603 billion. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees want to spend $640 billion. For those numbers and far, far more, head over to the detailed analysis of the presidential budget request released yesterday by CSBA’s Katherine Blakeley.
According to a report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “In constant dollars, defense spending fell from $768 billion in 2010 to $595 billion in 2015, a decline of nearly one-fourth, and President Obama’s final budget request was for only $583 billion” The report cited defense analyst Katherine Blakely, who has written that the rate of this drawdown “has been faster than any other post-war drawdown since the Korean War at a compound annual growth rate of -5.5 percent.” History will rightly assign the reigning commander-in-chief the lion’s share of the blame, but the so called military spending “sequester” was a bipartisan act that has yet to be reversed.
“To go back to a Reagan-era tagline," she added, "where’s the beef?”
Katherine Blakeley, research fellow at the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, and Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, discuss the disconnect between policy and money in the fiscal year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.
Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said there is “a lot of appetite” on Capitol Hill to pass defense spending legislation before the winter recess. But that doesn’t mean it will happen.
“Right now … they’re focused on figuring out the parameters of tax reform. So much as people might like to get a full-year defense bill settled in December, that will take a backseat to tax reform,” she said.
In May when the Trump administration sent a 2018 budget proposal to Congress, senior Pentagon officials said not to expect a large military buildup — the kind Trump talked about on the campaign trail — until 2019. So what does the military want to buy with the $125 billion it asked lawmakers to approve for new weapons and equipment? A new report by Katherine Blakeley of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, examines just that, and how the procurement accounts stack up against budgets in recent years.
