DoD’s $26B Budget Hail Mary ‘Not Going To Happen:’ Rep. McKeon

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/03/dods-26b-budget-hail-mary-not-going-to-happen-rep-mckeon/



DoD’s $26B Budget Hail Mary ‘Not Going To Happen:’ Rep. McKeon
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on March 07, 2014 at 12:01 PM

CAPITOL HILL: Despair, distrust, and sequestration dominated yesterday’s House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Pentagon’s 2015 budget request. Almost everyone on HASC hates the automatic budget cuts, and the president has proposed a way to bypass them, but comments from committee leaders and backbenchers alike showed how political gridlock makes any solution look far out of reach.

“We really have to live within right now something that I hate, and I’m sure you do and most of the members of the committee do, but it is the law and we’re stuck with it right now,” HASC chairman Buck McKeon told his high-level witnesses, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, and Pentagon comptroller Bob Hale. (Both McKeon and Hale are retiring soon).

Yes, the president’s budget adds $26 billion to defense as part of a budget gimmick called the “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative.” Beyond 2015 it assumes Congress manages to roll back sequestration and authorize $115 billion above the current law over four years. “I’m not really paying much attention to the $115 and I’m not paying much attention to that [$26 billion],” McKeon said bluntly, because that’s in the realm of, ‘that would be wonderful but it’s not going to happen.’”

In fact, the California congressman said, the administration’s budget gimmicks mask the severity of the problem and make it harder to mobilize the American people to solve it. For example, referring to the media outcry that the regular active-duty Army was shrinking to pre-World War II levels, McKeon said, “I saw stories that seemed to get peoples’ attention [saying] the Army going down to 440,000. I want them to know …. it really goes down to 420.”


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Recently proposed military budget cuts represent a 5.9% budget decrease. IIRC sequestration was supposed to be a $50 billion dollar a year budget cut.

The only thing reduced in the military budget was the cut to the military budget.