50+ Congressional Staff Briefed on
Defense Savings Options
Defense Savings Options
Yesterday, July 31, 2012, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives, Ben Friedman of the Cato Institute, and Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress, presented options and arguments for defense savings to a standing-room-only meeting of more than fifty Congressional staff in the Rayburn House Office Building. The meeting was moderated by Laura Peterson of Taxpayer for Common Sense and sponsored by the offices of Representatives Keith Ellison (D-MN), Jack Kingston (R-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and John Campbell (R-CA).
A central concern of participants was options for Fiscal Year 2013 defense appropriations and the likely amendment of the Budget Control Act.
Laura Peterson reviewed the debt and deficit challenge as well as the efforts to date to achieve significant defense savings. She noted that the defense industry has mounted a strong defense of current levels of spending, but that recent bi-partisan cooperation on defense budget restraint showed hope for greater savings.
Carl Conetta proposed a goal of reducing National Defense spending for FY 2013 by $15 billion to $18 billion, which would imply a top line of about $535 billion. Drawing on recommendations outlined in the Defense Sense report, he suggested significant savings could be realized by accelerating personnel reductions, reducing strategic weapon modernization, and selectively cutting conventional weapon programs. He pointed out that, despite the nation’s fiscal woes, the national defense budget had declined by less than 5 percent in real terms since 2010.
Ben Friedman challenged the notion that defense budget reductions, even at the level implied by sequestration, would imperil the economy or hobble the armed services. The impact of reduced budget authority in any one year would be spread over several years of outlays, he said. Greater budgetary restraint would encourage the armed services to compete and find new efficiencies. And the overall economic effect of debt and deficit reduction would be positive over the long-term. Funds removed from the Pentagon account would not simply disappear, he said, but could re-enter the economy in ways more conducive to growth.
Reinforcing the point about the delayed impact of cuts, Lawrence Korb pointed out that the Defense Department now holds $80 billion in unspent authorized cash from previous years. Korb also criticized making defense policy decisions based on industrial interests, noting that the Navy does not really want the F-35, on which it will spend more than $1.8 billion in FY 2013. Korb also challenged the assertion that significant budget reductions would bring disaster to the Pentagon, recalling that much deeper cuts had been enacted between 1985 and 1994.
Looking to the future, meeting participants saw the recent victory of the Mulvaney-Frank amendment as heralding more bipartisan cooperation in achieving defense savings. And they saw the post-election period – when the sequester threat would loom – as presenting a renewed opportunity for real progress toward a more sensible level of defense expenditure.
