Will The Pentagon Win The Debt Ceiling Fight?

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced the outlines of a possible Republican budget plan last week, and the big winner was the Pentagon. Even as McCarthy called for a freeze in the federal discretionary budget at Fiscal Year 2022 levels as a condition for raising the debt ceiling – a move that he promised Freedom Caucus members when they grudgingly supported his election as speaker in January – he signaled that the Department of Defense would not be impacted.

But since the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy account for over half of all discretionary spending, McCarthy’s approach would require draconian cuts in domestic programs – up to 27 percent, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If the plan also protects veterans health care – a question McCarthy has been vague about – cuts to all other discretionary programs would rise to 33 percent. Cuts on this scale will be opposed by virtually all Democrats, and likely some Republicans as well. Even so, the fact that they are being used as a bargaining chip for further negotiations is stunning.

Given how it is structured, McCarthy’s proposal dashes the hopes of advocates of reining in the Pentagon’s bloated budget, while prompting a sigh of relief from the Pentagon, its contractors, and their allies in Congress. When the idea of a budget freeze first surfaced, advocates and opponents of high Pentagon spending alike suggested that the freeze could lead to a cut of $75 to $100 billion in the Department of Defense budget from current levels. But this would only occur if – a big if – the proposed cuts were distributed equally across the board.

As I noted in an earlier column, some Republicans who were promoting the budget freeze rushed to twitter and the media to deny that their plan would have any impact on the Department of Defense. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said that defense was never discussed in the deliberations over the Speaker vote. All Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) could come up with in terms of potential cuts were the Pentagon’s alleged “woke agenda” and an oversized officer corps – moves that would be lucky to save a tiny fraction – perhaps 1 or 2 percent – of the amount approved for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy for this year.

McCarthy’s proposal – which is not detailed enough at this point to be called a plan – seems to confirm the fact that cuts in Pentagon spending were never seriously considered in the discussions of a budget freeze. The only real proof that this is not the case would be if members of the Freedom Caucus push back against McCarthy’s approach and call for Pentagon cuts to at least be on the table in budget negotiations.

All of this is not to say that there aren’t questions being raised about the size of the Pentagon’s enormous budget in some Republican circles. Christopher Miller, who had a brief stint as secretary of defense at the end of the Trump administration, has a new book out that suggests that the United States could cut the Pentagon budget in half. Miller underscored his reasoning in an interview with CBS News:

“We have created an entire enterprise that focuses economically on creating crisis to justify outrageously high defense spending. You have to starve the beast to make people come out of their cubby holes and start thinking creatively.”

Miller calls for replacing costly existing weapons platforms with more efficient modern systems, but he also raises larger issues, like the appropriate approach to the challenge posed by China:

“I think by constantly harping on the fact that China is the new threat and we’re going to go to war with them someday actually plays right into Chairman Xi’s hands and the Chinese Communist Party. They need to have an enemy that they can, you know, focus their people’s anger and attention on and I think we provide them that opportunity by constantly harping on the fact that the Chinese are the greatest threat to America.”

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has also called for a new approach to Pentagon spending. Writing in the American Conservative, in a piece entitled “Getting Serious About Responsible Defense Spending,” Roberts notes that “[t]oday’s Pentagon is approaching a 13-figure annual budget. Congress needs to put away its kid gloves and put the Department of Defense and other agencies alike under the knife to excise wasteful spending.” Roberts goes on to suggest specific areas for cuts, including closing unnecessary military bases and canceling outmoded weapons systems – moves that Congress has doggedly resisted, even when the Pentagon has tried to reduce spending in these areas.

The question is whether these calls for a measure of fiscal sanity when it comes to Pentagon spending take hold inside Congress, and not just in broader Republican circles.

In the meantime, on the Democratic side of the ledger, Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) have introduced a bill that would cut Pentagon spending by $100 billion per year, a figure consistent with scenarios outlined by the Congressional Budget Office in an October 2021 study on alternative paths for defense spending. The bill is being used as an organizing tool by a coalition of peace, arms control, good government, environmental, and immigration reform groups to build a core group of members of Congress willing to challenge runaway Pentagon spending, with the ultimate goal of building a majority in favor of cuts.

Whether they emanate from the right or the left, proponents of bringing Pentagon spending back down to earth will face bipartisan opposition by members who support high levels of spending based on pork barrel politics – the desire to pour Pentagon funding into their states or districts, in many cases regardless of whether said spending serves any identifiable strategic purpose. This is exactly the approach that led Congress to add $45 billion to the Fiscal Year 2023 Pentagon budget beyond what the department even requested.

But, as Yogi Berra said, “it ain’t over til it’s over.” McCarthy’s proposal is an opening gambit in a political fight that will play out over the months to come.

The last time there was a major fight over lifting the debt ceiling, the result was the Budget Control Act of 2011, which capped defense and non-defense spending over a ten-year span. Pentagon spending did fall by a few hundred billion dollars over that period compared to the department’s plans, but it still matched spending from the prior decade, when the U.S. had nearly 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon did far better than the domestic side of the budget because it had its very own safety valve – critics called it a slush fund – in the form of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, a separate funding stream that was supposed to be used to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The OCO account was not subject to the budget caps, so it was used to fund well in excess of $150 billion in programs that had nothing to do with fighting wars, and everything to do with keeping the Pentagon budget as high as possible.

It remains to be seen how much of McCarthy’s proposal makes it into the final budget deal that is reached to head off a default of the U.S. government. But hopefully voices calling for downsizing the Pentagon will be heard before the deal is struck. The alternative would be to continue on the path towards a $1 trillion Pentagon budget within the next year or two, at the expense of other urgent national priorities and our security writ large.