Defense Department Plans Bust the Budget and Risk Forced Cuts, Cautions CBO

Defense Department spending plans for the next
few years blow through the roof off budget limits imposed by law,
warns the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Specifically,
proposals in the five-year Future Years Defense Program (FYDP)
provided by Defense officials in April of this year violate
spending limitations imposed on the federal government by the
Budget Control
Act
(BCA) forcing (theoretically, since we’re talking about
government) unplanned cuts at a later date.

In fact, Defense plans are too spendy not just according to CBO
estimates of costs based on actual historical experience (“CBO
Projection” in the chart below), but also according to the Defense
Department’s own estimates (“Extension of FYDP”) of what stuff
costs.

Defense spending

According to the
CBO
:

The amount requested for the base budget in 2015 would comply
with the limits on budget authority established by the Budget
Control Act of 2011 as subsequently modified, hereafter referred to
simply as the Budget Control Act (BCA). After 2015, however, the
costs of DoD’s plans under both projections would significantly
exceed CBO’s estimate of the funding the department would receive
under the BCA, which limits appropriations for national defense
through 2021. To remain in compliance with the BCA after 2015, DoD
would have to make sharp additional cuts to the size of its forces,
curtail the development and purchase of weapons, reduce the extent
of its operations and training, or implement some combination of
those three actions.

Excessive costs, the CBO estimates, would be about $47 billion a
year more than the BCA allows. Even under Defense Department cost
estimates, that works out to roughly $31 billion a year more than
the law permits. The BCA would then require the sequestration of
those excess expenditures, forcing cuts.

Well, that’s what the law says. Whether Congress and the
president are collectively up to the task of holding the military
within budgetary limits is another matter entirely. Which may be
exactly why the Department of Defense seems to be making its plans
without any thoughts to legal limits on spending.

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