Report: Pentagon to ask for $51B in war funding

The Pentagon will request about $51 billion in war funding for the next fiscal year, a 20 percent drop from the amount Congress approved for fiscal 2015, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. 

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the Bloomberg report but said, “The President’s Budget and OCO submissions for 2016 will be made available at the appropriate time.” A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) did not respond to a request for comment. 

{mosads}The funding is part of the overseas contingency operations (OCO) fund, but the reported amount excludes the OCO funding for the State Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Besides OCO funding, the Pentagon’s baseline budget will be about $534 billion, Bloomberg reported. That amount would exceed the sequestration budget cap that is set to return this October. If appropriators honor the requested budget amount without raising the caps, automatic spending cuts could take effect.

Defense spending experts have predicted that Obama’s next defense budget would exceed the sequestration budget caps.

A large chunk of the OCO account has been used to pay for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, and the estimated decrease largely reflects the withdrawal of most combat troops from that country.

The fund also subsidizes operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Congress approved about $5 billion in OCO funding to fight ISIS in December for the rest of the fiscal year. 

The White House will unveil the president’s 2016 budget by the deadline on Feb. 2, an OMB spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.