U.S. 'Supercommittee' Announces Failure; Stage Set for Defense Debate By KATE BRANNEN Published: 21 Nov 2011 17:34 Print Email Bookmark and Share
Even before the so-called congressional supercommittee announced Nov. 21 that it had failed to identify $1.2 trillion to reduce the federal deficit, defense hawks on Capitol Hill announced their intention to introduce legislation that would roll back the resulting defense cuts. Joint Deficit Reduction Committee co-chair Sen. Patty Murray and co-chair Rep. Jeb Hensarling announced the panel's failure on Nov. 21, two days before the deadline for a deal. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
"I will be introducing legislation in the coming days to prevent cuts that will do catastrophic damage to our men and women in uniform and our national security," House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., said in a statement to reporters. Related Topics
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His staff emailed the statement at 3 p.m., two hours before the supercommittee co-chairs announced the panel's failure.
McKeon is not alone. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and other members of Congress say they too would work quickly to roll back the automatic spending cuts that would hit the Pentagon particularly hard.
"We are now working on a plan to minimize the impact of the sequester on the Department of Defense and to ensure that any cuts do not leave us with a hollow military," McCain said.
The White House has also said the defense cuts under sequestration go too far.
"We made clear that the cuts in the sequester are not the best approach to achieving the kind of deficit reduction that we need, and that the defense cuts are much deeper than we think are wise," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Nov. 21.
However, with the supercommittee failure being just the latest stalemate on Capitol Hill, many are wondering how a politically polarized Congress is going to agree to legislation that would alter the current law.
The Budget Control Act, signed into law in August, created the special congressional committee made up of six Democrats and six Republicans, three from the House and three from the Senate. The committee was charged with finding $1.2 trillion to reduce the country's debt, either through changing entitlements, cutting spending or raising revenues.
The committee had until Nov. 23 to vote on a plan, but with no plan in sight, supercommittee co-chairs Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, announced the panel's failure.
"After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee's deadline," their statement read.
To push the two political parties toward compromise, the Budget Control Act included a trigger mechanism of automatic spending cuts that would be pulled if the committee failed. Now that the supercommittee has officially failed, the trigger is considered pulled. However, the first sequestration does not happen until Jan. 2, 2013, leaving Congress and the president a year to respond.
"Congress could still act and has plenty of time to act," Carney said during a White House press conference.
Called "sequestration" by budgeteers and the "doomsday mechanism" by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the trigger language essentially said that if the committee could not come up with a $1.2 trillion plan, automatic spending cuts would do it for them. Half of the required cuts would come from budget function 050, or national defense, a category that's about 96 percent DoD funding.
However, a handful of defense-related accounts are exempt, such as veterans programs, and some DoD health care and retirement funds. War-spending bills, such as those used to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, are also exempt.
This provides the Pentagon a bit of a loophole, Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said. With this exemption, the Defense Department could move things from the base budget into the war budget, which remains well over $100 billion a year, in order to get around the cap, Harrison said.
Senate defense appropriators and authorizers have already begun this practice to a small degree with the 2012 defense bills.
"I think we're likely to see that again in 2013, so that will, in effect, soften the decline in defense spending, if they use that outlet," Harrison said.
The law also gives the president the option to exempt military pay from the spending cuts.
If sequestration is not rolled back, the defense base budget in 2013 would be cut to approximately $472 billion, according to analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
In its 2012 budget request, submitted in February, the Pentagon projected a budget for 2013 of $571 billion. This was long before the Budget Control Act was passed in August and even before the Pentagon received its final funding level for 2011, which was roughly $530 billion.
Last week, Panetta outlined the impact of sequestration in 2013 and beyond, saying the cuts would be devastating for the Defense Department. In a letter to lawmakers, Panetta said he objected to the level of cuts, but also the inflexibility with which they are administered.
The law, as currently written, dictates that sequester cuts must be applied in equal percentages to each "program, project, and activity."
"Such a large cut, applied in this indiscriminate manner, would render most of our ship and construction projects unexecutable - you cannot buy three quarters of a ship or a building - and seriously damage other modernization efforts," Panetta said.
At the very least, it is expected the Pentagon will seek flexibility from Congress in how it administers the sequestration cuts.
In the meantime, these issues promise to dominate a long political campaign season leading up to the 2012 elections.
As the political drama plays out, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Pentagon have to present their budget for 2013 in early February.
OMB has two choices: It can send over a budget in February that assumes the trigger is pulled or it can ignore the trigger and send over a budget that doesn't reflect sequestration and therefore can't be taken entirely seriously, Mackenzie Eaglen, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said.
Either way, "You don't really move the defense bills and you continue the wild ride of the last two years of halting stops and starts of continuing resolutions," she said.
