Kaine: Senate Has Begun Discussion to Ease Sequester Cuts

With fiscal 2014 fiscal more than halfway over and November midterm elections rapidly approaching, focus in Washington has once again turned to across-the-board budget sequester cuts that went into effect in March 2013.

Sensing an opportunity to possibly ease — or erase — the cuts that are slated to last until fiscal 2021, Department of Defense (DoD) officials are putting the spotlight on long-term sequestration pitfalls, such as the Navy’s aircraft carrier fleet being cut from 11 to 10 ships.

Lawmakers have started to take notice. During budget hearings before a bevy of committees over the past month, top defense officials are once again pointing out the dire consequences of sequestration.

“It is imperative that the [Barack Obama] administration and Congress address the problem head on — sequestration must be reversed outright, rather than simply obscured from public view,” Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Seapower.

Forbes, who has been the administration’s harshest critic for not including funds for the refueling and overhaul of the USS George Washington in the fiscal 2015 budget, said that the United States continues to face growing national security challenges, from Eastern Europe to the South China Sea, and they require serious debate about the direction of U.S. defense policy.

“Sequestration continues to hobble our military’s ability to plan properly for future challenges,” he said.

Among those challenges, the problem of Russia and Ukraine. Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin are at odds over Russia’s stance on and presence in the former Soviet republic, with a Russian SU-24 fighter jet making a low pass, or “buzzing,” the Arleigh Burke-class missile-guided destroyer USS Donald Cook about a dozen times April 12 in the Black Sea.

For their part, members of Congress have continued their bickering — at public speaking events and in hearings — over who is to blame for sequestration becoming the law of the land. Obama has repeatedly said lawmakers need to work together to find a solution, while saving his harshest criticism for Republicans. 

The original intent of the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011 was to set budget caps on federal agencies so the nation could trim down its debt. With Republicans and Democrats failing to agree on certain specifics — and each blaming the other for not compromising — sequestration was triggered on March 1, 2013. For the DoD, that meant cutting an additional $50 billion each fiscal year on top of the cuts mandated by the BCA.

Some of those cuts were eased in the Ryan-Murray Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, but full sequestration is expected to return in fiscal 2016. That slight relief was shown in the DoD’s fiscal 2015 budget proposal of $496 billion, about $7 billion more than sequestration would have allowed.

A senior Defense official said it is extremely unlikely that they will submit budgets that meet BCA caps in the future.

“We’re going to be sending budgets that ask for the amount of money the [Obama] administration thinks it actually needs,” Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics, said April 15 at the National Defense Industrial Association national logistics forum in Washington.

Kendall spoke at length about the harmful impacts of sequestration and noted that the DoD’s belief of not submitting BCA-capped budgets is seen in the fiscal 2015 budget request, which shows it intends to ask for funds that exceed those caps by $115 billion in the out years, fiscal 2016-2019.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Seapower that “the across-the-board, non-strategic cuts were never meant to actually go into effect and the administration believes budgets at sequester levels are not consistent with our national security needs.”

The former Virginia governor said that it makes sense that Obama plans to present budgets that don’t meet sequester levels in all years.

“The DoD isn’t asking for full sequester relief; it is willing to absorb 54 percent of sequester cuts, and it is my hope that we can find compromise to grant them some relief beyond [fiscal] 2015,” he said. 

Kaine said that some discussions have begun to take place within his committee on how to reduce the cuts in future fiscal years.

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