Republicans: End sequestration

Following the House’s lead, the Senate yesterday passed a budget resolution which will guide Congress on next year’s spending bills. For the Republican leadership it will be quite a triumph since both houses have not passed a resolution since in 2009.

But it might not matter. The White House has said that President Obama will veto any appropriations bill that increases the defense budget but doesn’t offer similar relief for domestic discretionary spending. Yet this is precisely what the budget resolution does.

{mosads}If the president keeps his word, the Congress and the administration are headed for an impasse that, in order to keep the government up and running, could ultimately result in a continuing resolution locking in expenditures at this year’s levels. Such a result would undercut ongoing operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan and might well put a final nail in the coffin of the military’s ability to carry out the country’s national security strategy.

To avoid such a scenario, Republicans in the Congress need to compromise with the president and put an end to sequestration. Doing so makes sense for three basic reasons.

First, and most obvious, President Obama isn’t going away. He has nearly two years remaining in office and Republicans will need to work with him if they want to begin to fix America’s defenses.

Second, as it stands, the budget resolution is a jerry-rigged effort to square defense hawks’ desires to turn around the decline in military capabilities with deficit hawks’ intent to keep the budget caps on all discretionary spending. Using the “off-the-books” operational war account to plus up Pentagon spending by almost $40 billion allowed the budget committees to say they had kept in place the Budget Control Act’s caps on all discretionary spending—domestic and defense.

But as the resolution’s budget top lines make their way through the salami-slicing appropriations process and run up against resistance from both the administration and Senate Democrats, Republicans will be faced with a fundamental decision: Is preventing an increase in the deficit more important than fixing the decline in military capabilities that successive secretaries of defense and military chiefs have said is substantial, and what the bipartisan National Defense Panel had called a “serious strategic misstep”?

Third, whomever the GOP picks to run for the Oval Office will almost certainly pledge to change course when it comes to the Pentagon’s budget. A recent national poll found that the Republican electorate views national security as the top policy priority, not the deficit. Leading GOP candidates Jeb Bush, Gov. Scott Walker (Wis.), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have all signaled their desire to up defense spending. Do Congressional Republicans want to be “off-message” with their own candidate on national security? And, more important, do Republicans really want to leave a possible Republican occupant of the White House an even deeper security hole for him or her to dig out of come 2017 by failing to compromise on a budget with Obama?

Certainly, a world coming unglued is far more dangerous to the country’s long-term prosperity than a marginal increase in debt.

Deficits of course do matter. But, as everyone also knows, the fundamental fiscal problem the country faces is the rise in entitlement spending. Curtailing entitlements and fixing the tax code are the long-poles in fixing the shortfall between government revenues and its expenses.

Moreover, just as the Republican Congress will have to deal with a Democrat in the White House, so the reverse holds as well. It should be within the Republicans’ ability to keep any increase in domestic spending within bounds. Given the admittedly sad state of the country’s infrastructure, if a good portion of that increase could be spent making needed repairs, it could be money well-spent.

Ignoring the Budget Control Act caps and ending sequestration, Congress could increase the core defense budget by $50 billion, eliminating the OCO work-around, and add $30-$40 billion to domestic accounts for the upcoming year. This would increase the annual deficit by about 15 percent: no small amount to be sure.

Still, compare that deficit increase with those accrued during the Reagan defense build-up. In 1982, the percentage increase in the deficit was over 60% and even larger the following year. Yet, by 1984, it was, as the presidential campaign effectively advertised, “Morning in America”, and the U.S. military was on its way to such a level of preeminence that we’ve largely been living off that investment ever since. Without a doubt, ending sequestration would also send a significant signal to allies and competitors alike who have had serious doubts about Washington’s capacity to govern, let alone lead internationally.

Crafting a compromise with the Obama White House has never been easy for Republicans. But a principled compromise that once again gives the military and national security its proper due is better than the chaos resulting from no compromise at all.

Schmitt is director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.