There’s an annual rite of spring in Washington, whereby the administration submits the largest defense budget in the history of the nation and it’s summarily denounced as wholly inadequate.
It happened during the Obama years, the Trump years, the Biden years, and this year is no exception.
“The FY ’25 defense budget is extremely tight, and that’s being generous,” groused Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, at an Army budget hearing last month. “At $895 billion for the year, that is a less than 1% increase over FY ’24. And when you factor in inflation, that 1% increase is actually a 2% decrease in defense spending.”
And that’s pretty much how every congressional budget hearing begins this cycle, with a rhetorical complaint that President Joe Biden’s budget request for the military doesn’t come close to meeting the challenges America faces.
“In the past few months, two of our combatant commanders have told me that the threats we face today are the most dangerous than any that they have seen in any time during their careers,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said at an appropriations subcommittee hearing in early May.
“We must be cleareyed that this budget request would represent a real cut in funding for the Department of Defense, since it fails to keep pace with inflation. It proposes a defense funding increase of just 1%. … That amount is well short of the $22.5 billion year-over-year increase that the department would need simply to cover projected cost escalations related to fuel, military and civilian pay, and medical care.”
And it’s not just Republicans complaining.
“The military services and the combatant commands are telling us they have unfunded requirements in excess of $20 billion,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) said at the same subcommittee hearing, addressing his comments to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
“I will tell you this, Mr. Secretary, that ranking member Collins and myself think we need a bigger number.”
There is a strong bipartisan majority in Congress that shares that now is not the time to force the Pentagon to trade off funding future capabilities to meet today’s needs, which Austin concedes is the plan.
“We made tough but responsible decisions that prioritize near-term readiness,” Austin testified. “Our approach dials back some near-term modernization for programs not set to come online until the 2030s.”
That doesn’t make sense, argues Collins and many others, at a time when China — identified as America’s “pacing challenge” — is modernizing its military at a breakneck pace, all while vowing to unify with Taiwan by force if necessary.
“China’s military budget and navy continue to grow, including a 7.2% increase in defense spending,” Collins pointed out. “Our naval fleet of 290 ships is already smaller than China’s fleet of more than 370 ships. Under this budget, the Navy’s overall fleet would grow by just one ship — a single ship — during the next five years, far fewer than the 435 ships China will have.”
In normal times what defense hawks in both parties would do is work together to bulk up the president’s anemic request with $20 billion to $30 billion in additional funds.
Except this year Congress is hamstrung by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, the deal that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced to make by his unruly hard-right flank intent on using the absolute need to raise the debt as leverage to rein in federal spending.
Raising the debt limit to avoid the national default on its bills used to be a pro forma task, but McCarthy brokered a deal to cap the 2025 budget that included acceptance of Biden’s proposed 1% increase for defense spending.
With default hanging in the balance, the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed with a bipartisan 314-117 House vote — followed by a 63-36 vote in the Senate, and Biden signed it, making it the law of the land.
So while Republicans moan about the need to spend more to restore American deterrence, they have no one to blame but themselves.
“The 1% increase is entirely inadequate,” Rogers lamented. “But this is the hand dealt to us by the Fiscal Responsibility Act that we all have responsibility for enacting.”
Democrats argue that all the handwringing about inadequate defense spending is at best unfair and at worst disingenuous.
“I voted for the Fiscal Responsibility Act not because I agree with the spending levels in the deal, but because this country could not afford to default on its debts,” Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), ranking member on the appropriations subcommittee, said, pointing out it was Congress — not the Pentagon — that imposed spending caps on the defense budget.
“I think those of us who voted for that law, we need to remember that,” McCollum said. “I hope Congress has learned a hard lesson, that we should not hold our national debt limit hostage over arbitrary spending caps.”
Congress has worked under budget caps before.
For 10 years from 2011 to 2021, under the Budget Control Act a provision known as sequestration, increases in defense spending were linked to commensurate increases in domestic spending, which resulted in years of gridlock.
The workaround was often passage of an annual supplemental appropriation for “overseas contingency operations,” which ended up being a catchall account where other funds could be added without triggering the spending limits.
Only recently has the Pentagon and Congress weaned itself from such budget gimmicks, only to find itself passing a $95 billion emergency appropriation this year for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the U.S. Navy’s submarine construction program.
Another supplemental could be one way to fund urgent needs that the Pentagon left out of this year’s budget.
But not everyone’s convinced the U.S. can’t buy a decent defense for nearly $900 billion.
“It can be summed up as big threats and a tight budget, and you have to figure out how to make that work,” says Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.
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“I don’t see a rain of more money coming anytime soon, so we’re going to have to get more creative,” Smith said at a hearing last month. “But we do have a fair amount. Where are we spending money that we shouldn’t be spending money? And how can we get more out of what we’re spending? Because, you know, we are $33 trillion in debt.”
“I would like to use the Winston Churchill quote about how, ‘Gentlemen, we’re out of money. Now, we have to think.’”
