House Republicans have joined their Senate colleagues in formulating a way to skirt sequestration limits on Pentagon spending.
Republicans in the House are proposing a total of $613 billion in defense spending for next year, they revealed on Tuesday, according to The Hill.
The sum is roughly $90 billion above the limits imposed by Budget Control Act of 2011. The difference would be financed by the Pentagon’s war-fighting fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund.
The military kitty has also been used by the Obama administration to request money for the Pentagon in 2016 above sequestration-mandated caps. President Obama has called on Congress to appropriate $612 billion in 2016 for the Pentagon—a number that includes $51 billion from the OCO.
Republicans’ proposal would mostly differ from the White House’s vision on defense in its plan for the coming years. If Republicans had their way, the US would spend $22 billion more than what Obama wants to spend over the next five years, and $151 billion more than what he would like to spend on the Pentagon over a decade.
Though it isn’t included in the $613 billion figure, the House GOP proposal would also approve a $20 billion “deficit-neutral” reserve fund that would give Budget Committee Chair Tom Price (R-Ga.) an opportunity to slightly top-up the Pentagon’s coffers. The additional funding, however, would be contingent on separate votes in committee and on the House floor.
As The Sentinel noted last week, leading Republicans in the Senate, namely Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), have also called on Congress to approve of “deficit-neutral reserve funds” for the Pentagon if it won’t repeal BCA ceilings on defense spending. Although they are non-binding and require revenue offsets, they grant lawmakers additional tools in seeking to add to the Pentagon’s already bloated budget—finances that the DOD won’t even be able to audit until fiscal year 2017.
Additional OCO funds could prove enticing, too, to Senate Republicans. As The Hill noted, OCO money could bridge a divide between deficit handwringers and sabre-rattlers. The former “wish to keep the BCA caps in place to constrain government spending,” the paper said, while the latter “argue the spending caps jeopardize national security and should be lifted.”
In a less friendly assessment of the OCO, Julia Harte, a national security reporting fellow for The Center for Public Integrity, called the war chest “a slush fund used by the military services, by lawmakers and by the White House to escape budgetary caps.”
