By a vote of 89-8, the Senate yesterday passed a $700 billion defense budget. That isn’t particularly newsworthy. As the New York Times reported, “The vote marked the 56th consecutive year that Congress has passed the defense policy bill—a point of personal pride for Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee.”
The important story is that Sen. McCain et al. have no plan for actually raising the necessary funds, either through more taxes, cuts elsewhere, or more debt. Previous budget fights played by the rules—compromising to abide by the bipartisan Budget Control Act caps on discretionary spending. Willfully ignoring the BCA elephant in the room, as the Senate just did, runs the risk of a government shutdown and/or sequestration.
The Trump administration opened the Pentagon funding floodgates when it debuted a $668 billion budget request earlier this year. Trump made good on his promise to rebuild the military by cutting deeply from non-defense accounts, thus creating the illusion of fiscal discipline. But he also called for increasing the BCA defense caps.
At the time, Sen. John McCain declared Trump’s budget “dead on arrival” because it cut too deeply from these other programs. He also declared the Defense Department increase to be insufficient. It was never clear how McCain would square that circle.
It still isn’t. It appears that he expects someone else to solve the BCA problem, or that it will magically disappear.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/senate-passes-pentagon-budget-bca-trainwreck-looms
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