Within the defense budget, a debate has been developing for some time between funding the personnel-related areas and the equipment-related areas. We get detail...
wfedstaff | June 3, 2015 7:07 am
By Suzanne Kubota
Senior Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio.com
The Defense Department is vowing to cut administrative costs so there’s more money for combat support long term.
The problem, of course, is where to make the cuts.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, makes the argument in a new report the dilemma a new form of the “guns and butter debate.”
In the past, Harrison told Federal News Radio, guns versus butter implied weighing funding for domestic against defense spending. Now, he said, it’s internal.
He defines the “butter” as paying for the “care and welfare of the people: pay and benefits and healthcare”. On the other side is “the guns part of the budget, which pays for equipment and buying next generation weapons systems and training and operations.”
“Going into the future,” said Harrison, “these two different halves of the budget are increasingly going to be at odds with each other.”
Harrison talked about some of the areas he expects to see cuts.
Harrison points out in his report “DoD provides healthcare and health insurance coverage to 9.6 million eligible beneficiaries, including active-duty troops, retirees, members of the Guard and Reserve, and dependents.”
Cutting care or raising costs has been a political third-rail: don’t touch it if you know what’s good for you. Harrison said that will need to change. “If they don’t, if these trends are allowed to continue, the butter part of the budget like healthcare, are going to grow so much that it’s going to be squeezing out investments in modernizing our force.”
Harrison said there’s a very good reason for the services to find the cuts: a rebate, of sorts.
They’re not just taking money out of the service’s budgets. What they’re doing is they’re saying “if you can cut some of your administrative and overhead costs,” and they’re asking each of the services to do about a billion dollars or so in the next budget for fiscal year ’12, “if you can cut that money out of administrative costs, we will then let you reinvest that within your own budget in modernization initiatives.”
So money cut won’t be money lost, said Harrison. “They actually get to reinvest it in themself.”
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