Will the Freedom Caucus Tank the Pentagon Budget?

The short answer to the question posed in the title of this piece is probably not. But Speaker-elect Kevin McCarthy’s pledge to the Freedom Caucus to seek a spending freeze at 2022 levels has sent shock waves through official Washington. Why? Because a freeze would wipe out the $100 billion that the Pentagon and Congress added to 2022 levels in the Fiscal Year 2023 budget that President Biden passed into law last month.

As I noted in a recent essay at Responsible Statecraft, there is ample room to make substantial reductions in current Pentagon spending levels while providing a more effective defense. But this column raises a different question: do the Pentagon and its allies in industry and on Capitol Hill have anything to fear from the Freedom Caucus?

The current situation bears some similarity to what happened prior to the passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), which set caps on military and domestic spending over a ten-year span in an effort to reduce the deficit. The BCA was a compromise reached in order to head off an effort by Republican deficit hawks to shut down the government. Once implemented, it ended up putting far more strain on domestic budgets than on the Pentagon, for a number of reasons. First and foremost was that the war budget – known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account – was exempt from the budget caps. The Pentagon took full advantage of this opening, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of pet projects into the OCO account that had nothing to do with ongoing wars. That’s why critics from both parties dubbed it a “slush fund.”

In fact, during the 10 years that the BCA was in effect, the Pentagon received as much as it had in the prior decade, adjusted for inflation, even though that prior decade included the peak of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cries that the BCA had “gutted” defense were simply false. What was true was that the Pentagon didn’t get every single item on its wish list, but that is not necessarily a bad thing given the department’s questionable judgment on questions like what new weapons programs to invest in.

So, now there is a slim Republican majority in the House with a powerful caucus exerting disproportionate weight in favor of some new form of budget caps. What will it mean for the Pentagon?

The first question is whether the Freedom Caucus has any realistic prospect of getting a budget freeze into law. A bipartisan majority just got done adding $45 billion to the Pentagon’s budget for Fiscal Year 2023 beyond what the department even asked for. It seems possible that if the Freedom Caucus, for example, demanded an across-the-board budget freeze in exchange for voting to fund the government or increase the debt limit, Pentagon budget boosters on both sides of the aisle would coalesce to keep that from happening.

If a freeze were to take effect, the question would then become whether the Pentagon would be held to the same standard as domestic programs. Would there be a new equivalent of OCO, this time focused on Europe or the Pacific? Would spending on military personnel be exempt? There’s no way of knowing at this early date, but no doubt ideas along those lines would be considered.

One question is what will happen to military aid to Ukraine, with or without an overall budget freeze. Freedom Caucus members like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have ridiculed Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelenksy’s requests for U.S. aid, and would likely seek to reduce it. But as with the Pentagon budget at large, there are enough votes in the rest of the Republican party and on the Democratic side to prevent that from happening. The real question is whether the steady – and necessary – flow of U.S. support for Ukraine to fend off Russia’s invasion of their country will be accompanied by a diplomatic strategy to keep the war from grinding on for years or escalating to a U.S.-Russia or U.S.-NATO conflict. The Biden administration is well aware of this challenge.

So, at best, the Freedom Caucus’s push for a budget freeze might throw a small wrench into the works in the drive to push Pentagon spending ever higher. But perhaps if it slows the momentum long enough, there might be an opening for a debate on how much is actually needed to defend the United States and its allies, what the right strategy is for a world in which power is increasingly diffused, and what the relative importance of military power should be when the greatest risks we face, from climate change to pandemics to widespread poverty and inequality, are not military in nature.