House chairman won’t rule out spending more than Trump’s defense budget

The Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday did not rule out Congress enacting a $640 billion defense budget regardless of President Trump’s proposal, describing the issue as an “ongoing conversation.”

“There’s obviously been a lot of talks in the last couple days about the numbers that the administration put out there, about whether that’s going to work or not, about what needs it meets, what needs it doesn’t meet, and that’s why I say this is an ongoing conversation that we’ll undoubtedly continue,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) told reporters.

Thornberry was responding to a question from The Hill about whether there have been conversations with congressional leadership to go above and beyond Trump’s proposal.

{mosads}The Trump administration has proposed a $603 billion base defense budget for fiscal 2018, well below the $640 billion that Thornberry and his Senate counterpart, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have advocated.

The administration has not provided details for what specifically the $603 billion will go to, other than saying it will be “predominately” for the Pentagon.

But on Wednesday, Thornberry gave reporters two charts detailing what hypothetically could be left out of the defense budget if it’s $603 billion and not $640 billion.

Thornberry’s examples include $10.9 billion for 33 F-35s, 24 F-18s and F-16 service life extensions; $15.1 billion for army combat vehicle and aviation modernization, Marine Corps ground combat element modernization and acceleration of Army prepositioned stocks as part of the European Reassurance Initiative; and $3.9 billion for existing facilities sustainment, facilities modernization and demolition and new construction.

The $603 billion could provide $1.4 billion for increased intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities; $3.8 billion for recruiting and retention, increased training capacity and increased troop numbers; and $1.5 billion for more hellfire missiles, advanced medium-range air-to-air missile stockpiles and joint direct attack munition tail kits, according to Thornberry’s charts.

“Obviously you could trade out one thing for another, but it just gives you some more granularity that if you do not do this or do not have a budget at this level what does that mean,” Thornberry said.

Despite not going as high as defense hawks wanted, Trump’s budget proposal would still be a hard lift in Congress, as it would fundamentally alter the Budget Control Act (BCA). Trump’s proposal calls for $54 billion more for the defense budget than the law’s caps allow, while slashing nondefense spending by an equal amount.

Changing the BCA requires 60 votes in the Senate, and Senate Democrats are signaling they will not agree.

Thornberry did not rule out the use of a war fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account that is not subject to budget caps to get to $640 billion.

“As cumbersome as OCO is, it’s better than not getting the money,” Thornberry said. “You give me lots of less than desirable options, I’ll try to figure out the best thing to do.”

The administration has not talked about OCO, but budget director Mick Mulvany was an opponent of it as a congressman.

Thornberry also took issue with the administration’s plan to cut State Department and foreign aid funding in order to pay for defense spending, as have other Republicans in recent days.

“I very much believe that we need to have a wide range of tools to use to advance our national interest and that includes some of the tools of the State Department, the intelligence community, Department of Defense and others,” Thornberry said. “Can we spend foreign aid more effectively? Absolutely. So there’s a host of other issues, but just in general, we can’t look to the military to do everything that needs to be done.”