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Pentagon officials and other proponents of big military spending have
three basic complaints about sequestration. That’s the process created
by last summer’s Budget Control Act
that would cut planned federal spending by about $1.1 trillion over the
next nine years through budget caps and a $110 billion in
across-the-board cuts in January 2013, with half the cuts coming from
defense.
The first complaint is that the cuts would harm national security. The second is that the defense cuts would cause great job loss and economic damage. The third complaint concerns sequestration’s breadth.
Because the hit coming in January would apply in equal proportion to
every “program, project, and activity” in the defense budget, Pentagon
officials claim it prevents prioritizing among programs and planning to
limit its pain. That’s what Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, always
ready with a violent metaphor, calls the “goofy meat-axe approach.”
The video
Cato posted yesterday concerns the first complaint, noting that the cut
is not that large in historical terms and that we could safely spend
far less if we defended fewer countries (a point Chris Preble, Justin
Logan and I have often made elsewhere). In a paper
Cato released today, Ben Zycher attacks the economic case against
military spending cuts, including sequestration, showing that they
generally increase economic productivity and employment in the long
term.
In a piece published today by CNN.com’s
Global Public Square, I concentrate on the third complaint. I point out
several ways that current law gives the Pentagon to control where
sequestration applies. The most important is a provision
in the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which the BCA amends. It seems
to allow the president to transfer funds at will beneath the defense
cap, provided Congress passes an expedited joint resolution approving
the shift. So the president, with Congress’s permission, can convert the
2013 sequester into a cap and prioritize among programs beneath it.
These options (and several others mentioned in Frank Oliveri’s excellent subscriber-only piece in CQ Weekly)
undermine the claim that the Pentagon cannot plan for sequestration.
The reason you hardly hear about them is that both the Obama
administration and Republicans leaders are gambling that the threat of
sequestration will serve their priorities (tax increases and entitlement
cuts, respectively), so everyone in power wants it to sound as scary as
possible.
To be clear, I do not think sequestration is good policy unless what I
just mentioned occurred—the 2013 cut essentially becomes a spending
cap. Even if that joint resolution process does not occur, the same end could be accomplished by amending the BCA.
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