HASC Finds $5 Billion Fix For Sequester Damage, But It Won’t Matter

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/06/03/hasc-marks-fix-to-2013-sequester-will-be-undone-by-2014s/



HASC Finds $5 Billion Fix For Sequester Damage, But It Won’t Matter
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 03, 2013 at 1:44 PM

CAPITOL HILL: Like water rushing downhill, flowing over or around or through every obstacle in its path, money in Washington will find a way. Today’s example is the newly released House Armed Services Committee’s “mark up” of the 2014 national defense authorization act.

Striving to address shortfalls in military readiness created by this year’s hasty and inefficient sequestration cuts, which are undermining everything from buying fighter aircraft to stopping drug shipments, cunning congressional staffers found over $5 billion above and beyond what was in the Pentagon’s budget request. In a particularly nifty trick, that extra money would even count as supplemental spending, which is outside the sequester. (Specifically, it would be part of the sequester-exempt “overseas contingency operations” (OCO) fund that the House set at $85.5 billion for 2014. The base Defense Department budget is set at $552.1 billion, which sequester does affect.)

Even in the Pentagon, $5 billion would go a long way to undo this year’s damage to the Army, the Air Force, the Navy and Marines — except that all this money is pretty much fool’s gold. Just like the president’s budget request and the budget resolutions passed by both the House and Senate, the HASC mark effectively ignores the fact that the sequestration cuts will continue in 2014 (and for the next eight years) as well, taking away more money than the mark managed to add — unless Congress and the White House can finally agree on a “grand bargain” to change the law.

“He’s obligated to mark to the House budget,” said an aide to House Armed Services chairman Buck McKeon, briefing reporters this morning. As powerful as the chair of HASC can be — especially since it’s the last committee left in the House that actually passes its annual authorization bill — McKeon can’t set his own, more realistic funding levels that disagree with the budget written by the House leadership and passed by his colleagues, even though that budget ignores the $52 billion elephant in the room. The fact that everyone — House, Senate and the president — is using the same sequester-not-included numbers doesn’t make them any less fictional. (To congressional Republicans’ credit, the House budget does attempt to reflect sequester by setting total discretionary spending at $966 billion, but it protects defense spending at the expense of non-defense in a way Democrats will never accept).