President Donald Trump speaks during an event at Joint Base Andrews

WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has drafted a $759 billion 2022 defense budget which would eliminate the entire Overseas Contingency Operations account, trim 1,300 soldiers from the Army and massively swell Navy shipbuilding accounts.

The Navy would get roughly $167 billion for designing and building more than 100 new manned and unmanned ships over the next several years, as well as overhauling nuclear aircraft carriers.

Overall, the cuts would help pay for the 82 ships and 21 unmanned vessels the Navy is currently planning to buy in the coming years, while also pumping cash into shipyards. The plan “proposes robust industrial base investments over the next 5 years,” the document says, “including: $2.8 billion within the shipbuilding account for shipbuilding and supplier base facilities to increase capacity; and $4.3 billion for the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan to ensure the Navy’s nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines are available to meet the Nation’s needs.”

The massive new Navy shipbuilding account was announced on Thursday, in which the administration is calling for a $27 billion shipbuilding budget in 2022, a huge increase from the $19 billion requested in 2021, and a topline of $33 billion by 2026.

Those numbers probably won’t mean anything, of course, since the Trump administration is deep into its lame duck period and the Biden administration will produce its own budget next year. One source said Pentagon leadership has advised the services to expect the Biden defense budget in March or April, which is in keeping with previous transitions. (It could be later, of course, depending on the Senate elections in Georgia and how Republicans treat Biden nominees.)

The release of the Trump plans will undoubtedly complicate life for the Biden team, which will now be forced to wrestle publicly with both the increases and the cuts at a time when budgets are stressed by Covid-related costs and the resulting pressure on the economy. 

The Pentagon referred questions on the 2022 budget outline to the White House. 

The biggest break from previous years is the zeroing out of the $69 billion OCO account, which “supports bringing America’s troops home from endless wars and directing those resources to key national security priorities,” the document states, calling for some of the money to be transferred to the base budget.

The document makes no mention of troop levels overseas, but the Trump administration recently cut troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ordered the withdrawal of US forces from Somalia.

The Pentagon has long been criticized for shifting the services’ base budget needs into the OCO budget, but until this plan, there’s been no real effort to zero out the account and push what remains into the base budget.

Overseas Contingency Operations account is “essentially emergency money. It can’t be moved from one ledger to the other without basically raising taxes on Americans,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Pulling money from that account for things like shipbuilding funded in the Pentagon’s budget “is just not how it works. Even if they were proposing moving money from under the actual base budget topline, it still doesn’t move like that.”

Elaine McCusker, acting DoD comptroller from 2017 to 2020 said that “the ‘rules’ for OCO fell away years ago,” however, “so I don’t expect it to be surprising that some of the financing for shipbuilding from within the total top line could come from OCO.”

Overall, the Trump administration says it would want to pump $45 billion into the Navy shipbuilding account from other parts of the DoD between 2022 and 2026, including $35 billion from OCO as well as “reduc[ing] the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund and eliminates the Counter-Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Train and Equip Fund account, while enabling DOD to prioritize Counter-ISIS activities across its global security cooperation program,” the document states.

The cut to the Army’s end strength would reap another $2.6 billion in savings by 2026, and the divesting of older weapons systems would scrape up another $6.6 billion in savings.

Breaking Defense reported last month that Pentagon leadership was looking to the other services to pay for part of the Navy’s buildup, an effort that delayed the release of the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan for months. The outline of the plan was released by the White House on Thursday; the Navy Secretary and Chief of Naval Operations have yet to comment on it. 

The Senate passed the 2021 NDAA on Friday afternoon, following a similar vote in the House earlier this week. President Trump has vowed to veto the bill over his late demands that a law governing social media protections be included. The ball passed with comfortably veto-proof margins in both chambers, but it’s unclear how many Republicans will support the president if he indeed rejects the bill that funds the military.