http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=AEF28D27-A803-493F-84AA-E67EE9FD7FE0 Lawmakers see budget opening in ISIL
By: Jeremy Herb
September 12, 2014 03:23 PM EDT
Some defense-minded lawmakers from both parties say the new U.S. campaign to destroy the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant should also spark a new effort at home: ending sequestration for the Pentagon.
With President Barack Obama warning the fight against the Islamic State militants will be a long-term effort, several lawmakers say the initiative should finally end the logjam over the sequester spending caps that have curbed defense budgets.
“If we don’t replace the cuts in sequestration, we’re going to compromise our ability to be successful against ISIL and other emerging threats,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “I hope those Republicans who thought this was a good idea will revisit that. If we don’t, we’re doing the country a great disservice.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the new fight against ISIL will “help change people’s minds, absolutely.”
“I know that if we don’t, we will cripple the United States’ ability to defend this nation,” McCain said. “That isn’t my view — that’s [the view] of every military leader I know.”
Sequestration has been dragging the Pentagon’s budget down since 2011, when the Budget Control Act was passed as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling. The Defense Department has long warned that the cuts will devastate the military’s readiness and modernization, but that message has been largely overshadowed by the larger fight in Congress over taxes and entitlements.
A budget agreement reached at the end of 2013 gave the Defense Department roughly $21 billion in relief in fiscal 2014 and $9 billion in 2015 — but the sequestration caps are set to return in full in fiscal 2016.
Some lawmakers are seeing opportunity in the president’s ISIL campaign, hoping the effort can spur larger bipartisan breakthroughs. Congressional leaders in both parties have backed his request for new authority to train and equip rebels in Syria.
“When America has a visible enemy, America usually unites,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who wants Congress to authorize military operations in Syria and Iraq. “These circumstances that have so revolted the ordinary citizens of this country, I think, will help accomplish” removing the sequester caps.
But not everyone is sold on that idea. Some lawmakers note the Pentagon’s warnings about the devastating impact to the military have fallen on deaf ears for years.
“We should have found a way to get rid of sequester long ago. There were so many reasons to [end] it that didn’t produce the result that I don’t want to sound overly optimistic,” said Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.). “But, maybe, it will help a little bit.”
Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the divisions among Republicans and Democrats over taxes and entitlements still run deep.
“That’s a rather sturdy logjam,” he said.
The question of how the U.S. will pay for military operations in Iraq and Syria was raised during a meeting of the House Republican conference on Thursday, according to a source with knowledge of the meeting. Some GOP lawmakers asked whether a yearslong military campaign in the Middle East would force Congress to bust through the budget caps that have been cheered by Republican fiscal hawks.
But budget experts say the fight against ISIL, at least in the short-term, will mostly affect the Pentagon’s war spending budget, which is not subject to the budget caps.
“The reality is they don’t need to modify the budget caps to do this,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The budget caps don’t actually constrain what we’re talking about doing in Iraq and Syria.”
And the Pentagon and its backers on Capitol Hill will almost certainly encounter opposition from lawmakers who have supported the spending cuts.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said he has concerns about both ending sequestration and increasing the Overseas Contingency Operations account for war funding. The Defense Department has already requested $58.7 billion in war funding for fiscal 2015, a reduction of roughly $20 billion from the previous year as the war in Afghanistan winds down.
“I’m not prepared to say we’ve got to obliterate the sequester,” Sessions said. “We lived with the Budget Control Act numbers last year. We’ve lived with them this year, and savings that the Defense Department was then executing are just now being harvested.”
Defense contractors and their supporters on and off Capitol Hill are likely to make the case that restraining the military when it’s trying to go on an offensive will make the U.S. look weak on the world stage.
“The fundamental change that’s going on here is we’re simply facing more threats than we had thought, so capping defense spending looks irresponsible,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst who counts multiple defense contractors among his clients. “You’d have to be naive not to connect the dots between Libya and Syria and Ukraine and Afghanistan. Things are going poorly in each of those places, and the United States has to respond.”
Arnold Punaro, a retired major general and former Armed Services staff director, said he expects the issue to come to a head when the administration likely submits a budget above the sequester caps in 2016.
Punaro, chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association, said ISIL is just one of many threats now facing the U.S. that simply weren’t in the picture when the Budget Control Act was signed three years ago.
“The world is much more dangerous, while the sequester has made our military less ready and less able to respond to all these crises,” he said.
