Business

Defense hawks mobilize against spending proposals

by Bernie Becker and Martin Matishak - 04/30/15 1:39 PM ET

House defense hawks mobilized Thursday against spending bill amendments they said would harm national security.

Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) urged his fellow lawmakers to oppose proposals from Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) that would take money out of the Pentagon’s overseas war fund. An increase in the account’s funding is crucial to ensuring defense hawks’ support of a joint House-Senate GOP budget.

{mosads}In his letter, Thornberry said the measures “strike at the heart of our national security challenges today” and would affect military efforts around the globe.

GOP leaders were forced on Wednesday evening to delay votes on an appropriations bill for the Veterans Affairs Department and military construction, typically one of the easiest to pass.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday that one reason for the delay was Armed Services Committee members were stuck deep into the night considering a massive annual defense policy blueprint.

Even so, the fact that Republicans had to pull the measure suggests the House will face a difficult task in passing spending bills this year and that the divide within the GOP over defense spending remains.

The House will now vote on the budget Thursday before moving to the spending bill. The budget adds roughly $90 billion to the war fund, which was a must-have for defense hawks. But opponents call it a slush fund that’s used to circumvent the spending caps put into place in the 2011 debt ceiling deal.

One House GOP aide said that would give leadership time to lobby members to vote against the Mulvaney-Van Hollen proposal, which would essentially undercut the budget from the start.

“I think it was a smart move on our behalf,” Boehner said about pulling the appropriations bill.

Specifically, the amendments from Mulvaney and Van Hollen would cut about $220 million from an Aegis Missile Defense site in Poland; roughly $90 million from the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, which is anchored in Bahrain; and $94 million in counterterrorism operations in Djibouti and Niger, according to Thornberry.

The measures also would cut about $103 million from forward-deployed aircraft in Italy, the staging area for crisis response for U.S. facilities and embassies in the region, including Libya, he said.

Van Hollen and Mulvaney intensified their efforts to pass their amendments Thursday, sending a letter of their own to House colleagues. Van Hollen added that he and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) would send a separate letter urging Democrats to fall in line behind the proposals.

In their letter, Van Hollen and Mulvaney insisted that even the Pentagon agreed the projects they targeted aren’t “war-related.”

“This gimmick undermines the budget process, and it is a barrier to having an honest debate on spending levels for defense and non-defense programs,” Van Hollen and Mulvaney said.

“If funding caps set in law are too low, then Congress should raise the caps by changing the law. It should not use backdoor loopholes to get around it.”

Tags Chris Van Hollen Mac Thornberry Mick Mulvaney