Trouble For Trump: Fixing Sequester, DoD Budget May Be A ‘Bloodbath’

SIMI VALLEY, CALIF.: “I don’t how we buy it back without a real bloodbath,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham. “It” is the $500 billion, 10-year cut to defense spending imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011, popularly (mis)called sequestration. Graham, one of Donald Trump’s harshest critics in the GOP, is not alone in thinking the president-elect’s promise to undo the BCA and boost defense spending dramatically will be hard to fulfill.

“It’s going to be harder than it looks,” Graham said at the Reagan Library’s annual defense conference here, “but we will get there, because failure is not an option.”

Yes, the Republican party now controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. But in the Senate, with its institutionalized preference for obstructionism, you need 60 votes to pass anything significant. That means you need Democratic votes, and Democrats have demanded that each dollar of sequester relief for the Pentagon be matched by a dollar for domestic programs. That’s anathema to most Republicans — but, said Graham, “without increasing non-defense spending, I don’t think we get to sixty.”

The problem in the House is the opposite: Keeping the Tea Party on board (instead of tossing your legislation in the harbor). If you increase defense spending, let alone domestic programs, Republican deficit hawks “are going to insist that you pay for it,” Graham said. There are many in the GOP who would rather abide the Budget Control Act, even with its cuts to defense, than see an increase in the deficit.

Donald Trump himself, however, is no stranger to debt, argued Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton: “He doesn’t have any problem racking up massive deficits in order to increase defense spending.”

Massive deficits, of course, is exactly how Ronald Reagan paid for his defense buildup — as much as many modern Republicans would rather forget this lapse by their icon, whom they hold in almost religious awe. Indeed, the conference is held just steps from Ronald and Nancy’s burial site, in a mountaintop complex resembling a temple. His legacy here, as in Washington, is inescapable. Under Reagan, the federal debt more than doubled, laying the foundation for our current fiscal nightmare, but the money rebuilt the “hollow force” of 1970s into the modern war machine that arguably spent the Soviet Union to death and that still dominates the planet today.

In fact, much of the equipment the US uses today was built in the 1980s: F-15, F-16, and F-18 fighters; B-1 bombers; Ohio-class nuclear missile submarines — and all of these, and more, are wearing out. “We have been living off the capital built up during the Reagan years, largely, for the last 25 years,” said former Senator Jim Talent, “and it’s gone.”

The Budget Control Act cuts have only deferred spending on defense, not eliminated it, Talent argued: It’s just “pushing the can down the road.” The troops whose exercises are cancelled still need to be trained someday; the neglected bases still need to be kept up; the aging weapons still need to be maintained, at ever increasing expense, until they can be replaced, at even greater expense.

“It’s not only terrible defense policy,” Talent said of the BCA, “it’s bad budgetary policy.” The country’s “potentially existential” budget problems are driven by ever-growing entitlement spending, he argued, not by defense. (A Democrat might argue they’re also driven by decades of tax breaks for the wealthy, not by domestic programs for the poor and middle class). But, lamented Talent, the illusion the Budget Control Act is actually controlling the budget has “sucked all the life out” of efforts to solve the real problem.

“You’ve got to put everything on the table,” agreed Leon Panetta, Obama’s former Secretary of Defense. ” You can’t just pretend that we can solve the budget problem by juggling discretionary spending. That’s not going to solve it when 2/3 of federal spending is wrapped up in entitlements!” (That’s actually the highest percentage for entitlements I’ve ever heard, and I was startled to hear it from a Democrat; even conservative Republicans normally say something like 60 percent).

Tackling these fundamental problems, all parties wistfully agreed, requires bipartisanship, a rare quality of late. “When I was Secretary of Defense,” recalled Dick Cheney, “my Number 1 ally on Capitol Hill was Jack Murtha, Democrat from Pennsylvania, chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee.” The two men met for breakfast at the beginning of every legislative session, compared to-do lists and desiderata, Cheney said, and agreed on the outline of the appropriations bill.

That’s not the way Washington works anymore, but after the 2016 elections, Cheney said, “we’ve got a fresh start. We’ve got a new president and a unified Congress.”

Senator Talent, likewise, was cautiously optimistic. He predicts an immediate infusion of cash in the form of a supplemental spending bill, patching the obvious holes in the Pentagon and giving Trump, the Pentagon, and Congress time to figure out a more lasting solution. It will just take time.

Even if it were politically possible to ramp up the budget in a hurry, the military couldn’t absorb it all, Talent said: “Like a person who’s basically been starving for a long time, you can’t serve them up a big meal and expect that they’re going to be able to eat it.”