What spending caps? Senators open to boosting the Pentagon’s budget
Appropriators from both parties now say that spending limits may not hold. But lifting them won’t be easy.
Capitol Hill powerbrokers came together to fund the government and pass a $95 billion foreign aid deal. Now some top lawmakers are opening the door a crack to another feat: boosting the Pentagon budget.
Lead Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services committees have already said they’re open to busting spending caps for the Pentagon as part of annual defense policy legislation. But a pair of top appropriators — whose panel actually parcels out funding for the Pentagon — are now talking about the chance of an eventual deal to exceed those limits.
President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2025 defense budget proposal stuck to last year’s debt limit deal caps of $895 billion, a 1 percent increase from the previous year. While the request complies with defense and domestic spending caps set last year, hawks have nonetheless criticized Biden for not requesting enough for the military.
To be sure, any move to blow past the budget caps would be an uphill fight. Before agreeing to it, Democrats would want to push for increases to domestic programs, which conservatives oppose. Increasing the Pentagon budget would also test the influence of the House GOP’s fiscal conservatives, although they just failed to stop Congress from passing the foreign aid package. A deal is also unlikely to be ironed out before the November elections that will determine control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Yet recent statements from two senators who control the Pentagon purse strings — one from each party — show there may be movement toward going beyond the funding limits and giving the Pentagon more money.
Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said he hasn’t been given an official topline for his version of the funding bill. And he raised the possibility of exceeding spending limits.
“We’re not sure that the caps are going to hold,” Tester told reporters this week. “We’ll see what happens.”
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the Senate’s top Republican appropriator, has signaled an openness to spend more than the proposed defense topline. She noted the budget cap “does not even begin to cover inflation, much less the growing and dangerous threats we are facing around the globe.”
“It’s clear that the budget is woefully inadequate,” she told reporters this week. “This is the lowest number of ships requested by the Navy in 15 years. And China keeps building its navy bigger and bigger. That’s just one example of the inadequacy.”
The argument goes that the two-year caps imposed by last year’s debt limit deal fall short of the funding needed for a military beset with recruitment, industrial base, acquisition and ship maintenance problems. China, meanwhile, is planning a 7.2 percent defense budget hike.
While the Armed Services panels could advocate for a higher topline in their policy bills, appropriators must adhere to the defense spending cap as they allocate funding, unless congressional leaders strike a deal to raise the limits or devise a way around them.
“I will tell you bluntly, I think this budget is too low. I think that’s been consistently true [with] the administration,” new House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in a recent hearing. “But I also recognize we’re under the constraints of the Fiscal Responsibility Act and that’s going to make it difficult for us to do some things that I think we need to do.”
Despite lacking a formal topline — which Senate leaders and appropriators have yet to decide — Tester said his panel “can still construct a bill” over the coming weeks because appropriators “know in a ballpark” how much funding they’ll have to parcel out.
“We’ve got what we need to start working, but we do need a topline and we’ve got to have a topline that isn’t changed every month,” he said.
Still, such an effort wouldn’t come to a head until after the elections in November. By some estimates, the GOP is seeing its chances of retaking the Senate rise — with Tester’s seat as one of their top targets to flip — which creates a disincentive to resolve any major issues until Republicans, as they see it, have the power of the majority.
And yet Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is already laying the groundwork for a hike — and telegraphing how he’d shape it.
In a Hill op-ed this week, he assailed Biden’s defense budget as “blind to the New Cold War.” Wicker argued the Biden request underfunds U.S. Indo-Pacific Command by $11 billion, cuts $900 million from missile defense programs and shrinks the Navy and Air Force.
“Fortunately, Congress has the power of the purse and can demonstrate to the world that America still pursues peace through strength,” Wicker said.
It’s not the first time lawmakers have tried to blow past the caps set by the debt limit deal. Last year, Senate appropriators produced a fiscal 2024 Pentagon spending bill that included $8 billion in emergency funding to pad the budget.
Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Collins agreed to pair that money with billions more in emergency funding spread across non-defense bills to further lessen the impact of the caps.
The House, however, did not endorse the move and it was dropped from the final full-year spending package that passed in March.
Yet the Pentagon still saw more funding for the year, just not through the regular appropriations process. The $95 billion in foreign assistance signed this week by Biden is outside of the budget. Yet much of that money is destined for the defense industry to purchase new weapons for the Pentagon to replace equipment transferred directly from U.S. military inventories.