Defense News

Defense budget work continues even with Congress on recess

When Congress left for recess this month, it left lots of Defense Department questions up in the air. When it returns in September, it will have just a few shor...

Tom Temin@tteminWFED

August 7, 2023 1:24 pm

7 min read

When Congress left for recess this month, it left lots of Defense Department questions up in the air. When it returns in September, it will have just a few short weeks before the end of the federal fiscal year. For an update, Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to Bloomberg Government defense reporter Roxana Tiron.

Interview Transcript:

Tom Temin And let’s talk about something that people are wondering about to legislatively, and that is continued work with Ukraine with respect to stockpiles of weapons and the drawing down of what we’ve got and so forth. And what did Congress, quote unquote, say about that and what’s the status of that right now?

Roxana Tiron So it’s a little bit of a tough situation. We’re expecting a request from the Biden administration for another emergency supplemental for Ukraine and potentially other defense issues in the next few weeks by September, by the time Congress comes back. We’re expecting him to ask for more money to help Ukraine with the counterinsurgency. It’s a very critical time. The issues are very complicated on the Hill. You have a Republican-led House where a very small but intense majority opposes more aid to Ukraine. You have the speaker of the House who has said he doesn’t want to do another supplemental. But then on the other side, you have the Senate, the Democratic-led Senate, where in fact, the GOP and the Democrats are hand-in-hand in agreement that they need to have another supplemental, potentially use that supplemental for other defense needs as well, targeted China, Taiwan as well. So so the situation is a little bit up in the air. The Defense bills that have been written so far, we are not in final stages for any of them. The Defense bills have been written so far, only carry authorization for $300 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Fund. That is obviously something that is always authorized in the defense authorization bill. It covers fiscal year 24. But it’s not enough. And the Biden administration has said from the from the very beginning they can’t tell how the war is going to turn out. It’s a really tough to plan the year ahead when they ask for the budget.

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Tom Temin It reminds me almost of the debates over the old overseas contingency operations budgets.

Roxana Tiron It’s just like that. Only the overseas contingency budget had a lot more support, I think, in the House than now Ukraine does. And I think that’s going to be a tough issue because Kevin McCarthy enjoys a very, very small margin. His speakership is tenuous at best. And he’s had his his group of Freedom Caucus, he’s had to pull spending bills off the floor because his caucus, Freedom Caucus, is trying to get even more spending cuts into effect. I think it’s going to be a very, very tough situation with a lot of people who believe in helping Ukraine. There were a couple of amendments to the defense authorization bill in the House to try and cut off security aid for Ukraine. And you did see sort of huge bipartisan support. But there were 70 Republicans who voted to cut off aid.

Tom Temin But there’s enough Democrats and enough Republicans left over to make sure that that would pass in the House.

Roxana Tiron If Kevin McCarthy breaks out. I think that’s where it becomes a little tougher. He might not obviously have much of a choice, but it is a it’s a risky proposition.

Tom Temin Yeah, because it has a lot of effect on the defense industrial base and on the strategy for supplying U.S. forces to restore what it is they have given up. So in some ways, that money to buy back from us, what we need then would cascade over into the regular defense budget, I would think.

Roxana Tiron Yes, the Pentagon put out some numbers, actually. There’s $20.5 billion committed to replacement of equipment that we have sent to Ukraine under the Presidential Drawdown Authority. There’s 25.9 billion already appropriated for that. That’s just for replenishing the stocks that have been depleted by sending them to Ukraine. And then you also have the Ukraine Security Assistance initiative. Right now, that 16.4 billion has been committed, a total of 18.6 billion has been appropriated. So you get a sense of the amount we’re talking about and the financial need.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Roxana Tiron. She is senior national security reporter for Bloomberg Government. And getting to the NDAA. These two versions of past their respective chambers, but they’re mostly together. But there’s one or two issues they’re miles apart on. And then the funding bills. Where does all of that stand? Let’s talk about the NDAAs first.

Roxana Tiron The Senate for once actually passed its own version. In the last few years, it has not been able to get it off the floor. Huge bipartisan support. The big difference, I think, obviously the funding level is the same. It stays within the the deficit deal that President Biden and Kevin McCarthy struck earlier this year. But the big issues here are basically social policy issues. The House carries a ban on the pentagon’s policy to allow for time off and travel expenses for troops and their families who might seek an abortion or other reproductive health. And the Senate does not. The Senate didn’t even touch that issue. The House also carries a ban on transgender health care. It tries to eliminate a lot of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the Pentagon. It’s got a lot of a lot of these social cultural war provisions that the Senate doesn’t.

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Tom Temin So can they be reconciled?

Roxana Tiron Yes, they can. And I did talk to the people who would be negotiating this. So chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers. He’s a Republican from Alabama. And Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington. I talked to both of them. And neither of them expects the policies that were passed in the House to actually end up in the final bill. The issue is not the negotiation over the final bill. The issue is whether the House will be able to pass it when it comes back, when it comes back in negotiated form, in conference report form, because again, you run into you’re running into the problems that Kevin McCarthy has been having his entire speakership. He doesn’t have enough Republicans. He needs he needs to pass bills with plenty of Republican support. And if these policies are out, he might not get that. So the question is, is he going to just say, hey, we have we’ve made our statements, but we do need to pass this very important bill. It’s passed for 62 years in a row. This would be the 63rd. So that remains to be seen. They still have to point conferees to the bill. They haven’t done that. They will officially do that in September. In the meantime staff is working behind the scenes, so that’s technically worked out. But we have a huge, we have a very tough bridge to cross until we get there, because we do have the threat of government spending expiring at the end of September.

Tom Temin Right. And so that brings us to the appropriations side of the negotiations. And they’re not very close to there yet either, are they?

Roxana Tiron No. The Senate marked up all the bills in committee. There’s huge, obviously, especially in defense and foreign policy, a huge funding difference. The Senate decided to go with emergency supplemental spending to add more money so that they don’t have to stick particularly to the debt ceiling deal. The House is insisting on on cutting even more spending. And so they’ve not been able to get other than the military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill, which is usually a very, very easy pass. Other than that bill that barely squeaked by, they were not able to pass any other bills on the floor. So they’re coming back to to this Herculean task to pass spending and then marrying them up with the Senate and negotiating a final spending agreement with the Senate. They only have 12 working days before government spending expires. So it’s going to be a tough situation.