Posts Tagged ‘debt ceiling agreement’

While many lawmakers have cited the upfront costs associated with carrying out base closures as an argument against authorizing a new BRAC round at a time when the Pentagon is being forced to slash spending, one defense analyst believes shuttering excess facilities is one key structural reform the military needs to implement to rein in its budget. “No business in America would be satisfied operating for a decade with 21 percent excess facilities,” said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments …

Despite the need to identify $50-plus billion in fiscal 2014 savings — barring a long-term deficit reduction deal that replaces the sequester — the Obama administration and Congress likely will put off discussing ways to trim the defense budget until late in the process for crafting spending bills for the department. The White House already has said the FY 2014 budget request it sends to Congress next week will ignore sequestration, which would pare defense spending by 9.9 percent next year …

If sequestration continues into fiscal 2014 and beyond, the Pentagon will not rely on furloughs of civilian employees to find savings, but rather will explore “other options,” DOD Comptroller Robert Hale said Monday. “They may not be pleasant, and they may force us into some difficult choices. But we definitely don’t want to repeat what we’re doing now …

More than 700,000 civilian workers at DOD will be forced to take 14 days of unpaid leave in fiscal 2013, eight fewer days than officials had been expecting, as a result of the spending measure President Obama signed into law on Tuesday. By shifting $10 billion into the Pentagon’s operations and maintenance accounts, the FY 2013 spending bill alleviated a shortfall in the account that pays for civilian salaries, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters on Thursday …

The sequester will force the Pentagon to cope with a $41 billion spending reduction in the current fiscal year, rather than an estimated $46 billion, after the fiscal 2013 spending package signed into law this week trimmed defense funding sufficiently to comply with the FY 2013 cap on discretionary spending. The continuing resolution that funded government operations in the first half of the year exceeded the discretionary cap imposed by 2011′s Budget Control Act and, as a result, would have triggered a second sequester to bring the defense budget in line with the cap …

The Defense Department may finally have acknowledged it will need to deal with the sequester this year, but officials remain in denial that they will need to plan for deep spending cuts that could last past the end of the decade, several experts said at a budget forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. “There still is a creeping lack of realism over there. They have their fingers crossed that this will somehow all go away and be better,” said Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center …

The House on Thursday quickly approved a fiscal 2013 continuing resolution to keep the government open through Sept. 30, sending the bill to President Obama for his signature. The stopgap spending measure — which includes individual spending bills for defense, military construction-veterans affairs, homeland security, agriculture and commerce-justice-science — locks in $85 billion in sequester cuts for FY 2013. It provides $984 billion in discretionary spending for fiscal 2013, after accounting for the across-the-board spending reductions …

The Defense Department will delay sending out furlough notices to almost 800,000 civilian employees to allow officials to determine whether the fiscal 2013 continuing resolution Congress cleared Thursday can reduce some of the unpaid days off workers would be forced to take. DOD civilians had been told that they would be furloughed for up to 22 days between April and the end of the fiscal year to offset the impact of $46 billion in defense cuts triggered by sequestration …

The Government Accountability Office is expected to review how the federal government prepared for and carried out sequestration, following a request earlier this month by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan asked the congressional watchdog agency to monitor agencies’ compliance with the across-the-board spending cuts and “to review how agencies determined what constituted a ‘program, project, or activity’ for purposes of the sequester …

A final vote in the Senate on a fiscal 2013 continuing resolution is scheduled to take place Thursday and likely would be followed by a vote by the House, allowing Congress to avert the possibility of a government shutdown before the start of its recess. Once the Senate passes the stopgap spending measure needed to keep the government running for the last six months of the fiscal year, the House is poised to approve it as well …