When Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s back was against the wall during the January House speakership fight, he struck a deal with GOP holdouts, which would have, among other things, capped discretionary spending at 2022 levels.
At the time, McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he was open to defense budget cuts, a proposal then pushed as a bargaining chip by those Republican holdouts, including Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas).
The ongoing debt ceiling negotiations and the looming default date offer the first test of how sincere these calls were. Republican members of Congress have so far held firm that any debt ceiling increase must be accompanied by spending cuts, but talk of the DoD budget being on the table has been completely absent from the public debate.
To be fair, the talk about defense cuts dropped off soon after McCarthy secured the speakership. Shortly after he gained the gavel, some Republicans who had originally opposed the Californian’s bid assured defense hawks that the Pentagon budget was never really on the chopping block, and some reporting suggested that cuts weren’t coming anytime soon.
Nonetheless, members of the larger GOP and conservative ecosystem appeared at least temporarily on board with slaughtering one of the party’s sacred cows.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the traditionally hawkish Heritage Foundation, wrote an op-ed in The American Conservative in late January arguing that, for too long, “Congress accepted the D.C. canard that a bigger budget alone equals a stronger military,” and “as lawmakers face an impending debt limit deadline yet again, they can’t behave as they’ve done in the past. Defense and non-defense spending must both be on the table.”
The piece included suggestions for where to make cuts, including retiring inefficient and outdated weapons systems, targeting “wokeness and waste,” and pushing European allies to increase their own defense spending.
In February, Roberts spoke with Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos about what motivated that shift. “We care so deeply about a strong Department of Defense, and most importantly, we care so deeply about the rank-and-file servicemen and servicewomen that we want to ensure that Congress is doing its job and providing the Pentagon direction on where money should be best spent,” he said. “ It’s laughable on its face that there’s any agency in the federal government that doesn’t have wasteful spending, including the Pentagon.”
Chris Miller, who served as acting Secretary of Defense for the last months of Donald Trump’s presidency, recently published a book in which he called for a nearly 50 percent reduction in the Pentagon’s budget.
At a Cato Institute event publicizing this book, Miller declared: “I think we have an opportunity to come home, rethink, retool, rearm, [and] reinvest. (...) We need to take a neo-isolationist stand right now and reduce our commitments overseas. I think we were strategically over-extended.”
Meanwhile the Republican debt ceiling bill, entitled the “Limit, Save, and Grow Act,” which passed the House in late April, raises the borrowing limit into next year and caps federal spending at Fiscal Year 2022 levels. Republicans have pledged to focus cuts on programs relating to federal health care, education, and labor programs — but ultimately, they leave defense untouched in these conversations.
“Given how it is structured, McCarthy’s proposal dashes the hopes of advocates of reining in the Pentagon’s bloated budget, while prompting a sigh of relief from the Pentagon, its contractors, and their allies in Congress,” wrote the Quincy Institute’s Bill Hartung in Forbes last month.
Republican senators, for their part, have expressed ironclad support for the House GOP plan. A letter spearheaded by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and signed by 43 of the chamber’s 49 Republicans, asserts that they will “not be voting for cloture on any bill that raises the debt ceiling without substantive spending and budget reforms.” The letter does not contain any details on what they are willing to include as part of these reforms.
Lee’s office did not respond to requests for comment on whether defense spending cuts would be considered.
The defense budget accounts for approximately 44 percent of discretionary spending. If, as expected, the Republican budget reduction proposal does not include the Pentagon, domestic programs would have to be cut by up to 27 percent, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The debt ceiling debacle has proven to be little more than political grandstanding on defense. It takes up almost half of discretionary spending – it is simply not possible to take defense off the table and discuss spending cuts in good faith,” Julia Gledhill, a defense analyst on the Project of Government Oversight, told RS.
Trimming the Pentagon budget is possibly the only cut that would garner a modicum of bipartisan support, though Democrats and Republicans don't necessarily agree on which parts of the defense budget should get the haircut.
Democratic lawmakers Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) have led an effort to reduce the budget by over $100 billion, while a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Reps. Pocan and Lee, recently introduced legislation that would cut DoD’s spending if it continued to fail financial audits.
There is perhaps a sense that proposing military reductions in the current debt ceiling process is not worth the required effort at a time when the party needs to be unified to challenge the Biden administration.
"Right now, cuts to defense spending aren't being discussed because the bill passed by House Republicans puts a cap on overall discretionary spending levels, instead of mandating cuts to specific agencies or programs,” Dan Caldwell, Vice President of Center for Renewing America, told Responsible Statecraft. “If there is an overall cap put on discretionary spending as part of a deal to raise the debt limit, I would expect a debate over defense spending to play out in the appropriations process.”
Even some supporters of Pentagon reform argue that this is not the time to tackle that particular challenge.
“Defense cuts should certainly be on the table in any budget deal. But our bottom line is the debt ceiling needs to be raised and there shouldn’t be any budgetary hostage taking as part of the debt limit talks,” Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense told RS in an email. “After that let’s talk budget cuts and reforms that right the fiscal ship, defense spending has to be a part of that.”
If Republicans successfully strike a deal and manage to implement a cap on discretionary spending, perhaps it will lead to a debate over the Pentagon budget. Even if it does get to that point, however, Caldwell says, “that debate will primarily be centered around how large of a budget increase the Defense Department should get as opposed to how to cut overall levels of defense spending."
