The House Military Construction-Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee marked up the first spending bill for fiscal 2014 on Wednesday, but it still is unclear how the two chambers will clear individual spending bills and bring them to conference this year, reports CQ. The hurdle is the wide chasm between the House and Senate over the FY 2014 topline for discretionary spending …
The House’s draft fiscal 2014 military construction-veterans affairs spending bill calls for spending $9.9 billion on military construction and family housing programs, a $646 million reduction from the enacted level for FY 2013. After accounting for sequestration, though, only an estimated $8.8 billion is available for those programs this year. Overall, the draft bill provides $73.3 billion, a $1.4 billion increase above this year’s enacted level …
The House kicks off the fiscal 2014 appropriations process next week when the military construction-veterans affairs spending bill is marked up in subcommittee. The markup will provide the first peek into how appropriators in the Republican-led House will divvy up spending next year under the $967 billion discretionary spending cap established by recent budget legislation. Senate Democrats, on the other hand, intend to ignore the sequester and allocate a topline spending level of $1.058 trillion …
While the $37 billion hit the defense budget is taking in the current fiscal year is harming military readiness overall, fiscal 2013 military construction projects largely have not been affected, Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale told lawmakers Thursday. “We believe we can absorb most of the sequestration reductions with available … savings. We don’t intend to reduce the scope of any construction projects. At least [right] now we don’t believe that will be necessary,” Hale told the Senate Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee …
During a Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing Wednesday on the Air Force’s budget request, Chairman Dick Durbin (Ill.) acknowledged that he remains skeptical about the BRAC process after witnessing the previous five rounds. “Base closure commissions are supposed to take the politicians out of the process. I think they’ve replaced the politicians with other politicians,” said Durbin, the Senate’s number two Democrat. Durbin said he shared the concern of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, that base closures do not produce sufficient savings …
The strategic review of defense priorities now under way at the Pentagon is not intended to recommend ways its budget can be trimmed to absorb $52 billion in sequester cuts next year, but almost certainly will influence decisions made by both lawmakers and the administration as to what spending categories will bear the most severe cuts. “The choices the president and secretary of defense make in response to the decision points identified in the review in the months thereafter will then inform our 2015 budget submission as well as how we execute our 2014 budget …
The House plans to start taking up fiscal 2014 appropriations bills in June, with the defense spending measure possibly reaching the floor by the middle of the month. House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Ky.) is expected to get the process started shortly by allocating the $967 billion available for discretionary spending next year among the 12 spending bills, reported CQ. As long as the House and Senate fail to come to agreement over a FY 2014 budget resolution, though, the Democrat-controlled Senate will be crafting spending bills based on a pre-sequester figure of $1.058 trillion …
House Appropriations Chair Harold Rogers [...]
Until a deal is reached between Democrats and Republicans over topline discretionary spending for fiscal 2014, the House may consider only a small handful of individual spending bills, including defense and military construction-veterans affairs. As things stand now, House appropriators favor a government-wide spending level of $967 billion for next year, which reflects an assumption that the spending caps under sequestration will remain in effect. Senate Democrats, on the other hand, plan to set fiscal 2014 discretionary spending at the pre-sequester level of $1.058 trillion, a $91 billion difference …
As the budget season gets under way, Democrats and Republicans will need to find a compromise over sequestration before appropriators can craft fiscal 2014 spending measures. As the law currently stands, automatic cuts will result in government-wide discretionary spending falling from about $984 billion in the current year to $967 billion in FY 2014. That’s the figure House appropriators favor …