WASHINGTON – Averting a second shutdown tomorrow at midnight should be a given, not a benchmark for success. Appropriating money is the most fundamental obligation laid out for lawmakers in the Constitution. But here we are.
The 2018 fiscal year started last Oct. 1, but Congress still has not gotten around to passing a defense appropriations bill. Instead, the military has been funded by a series of short-term spending agreements that cover their operations for a few weeks at a time. These continuing resolutions – or “CRs” in Washington shorthand – make leaders at the Pentagon bonkers and result in negative consequences that aren’t obvious to people outside the armed forces.
With funding set to run out again at the end of Thursday, congressional leaders are scrambling to get out of the pickle they got themselves into. There are signs of an impending breakthrough, but stumbling blocks remain.
The House passed a bill last night that would increase defense spending to $584 billion annually and guarantee it through Sept. 30, while funding the rest of the government at current levels through March 23 (six weeks). But this is dead on arrival in the Senate, where at least nine Democrats need to crossover because of the 60-vote threshold to open debate.
Senate leaders say they are very close to finalizing a bipartisan, two-year deal that would boost defending spending by $80 billion above the existing $549 billion while increasing nondefense spending by $63 billion. Many conservatives in the House say that’s too much domestic spending for them to stomach, though it could get over the finish line with Democratic support.
President Donald Trump threw a curveball by declaring that he wants a shutdown tomorrow unless Democrats agree to his hardline immigration demands. “I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this stuff taken care of,” he said yesterday afternoon at a White House event designed to highlight crimes perpetrated by immigrants. “If we have to shut it down because the Democrats don’t want safety . . . let’s shut it down.”
“Trump’s remarks appeared unlikely to snuff out the negotiations, which mainly involved top congressional leaders and their aides – not the president or his White House deputies – and have largely steered clear of the explosive immigration issue,” Mike DeBonis and Erica Werner report.
“House Democrats have nixed their annual policy retreat because negotiations on a budget framework and immigration proposals have hit a critical juncture and party officials wanted to avoid the appearance of leaving town for a resort on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,” Paul Kane reports. “Instead, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s caucus will hold its breakout sessions and meetings inside the Capitol complex, allowing the California Democrat to sneak away to any key bipartisan talks at the leadership level.”
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis predicted Tuesday that Congress will wind up passing another stopgap measure to avoid a shutdown. “Without sustained, predictable appropriations, my presence here today wastes your time because no strategy can survive without the funding necessary to resource it,” he grumbled to members of the House Armed Services Committee, where he was discussing the new National Defense Strategy. “Under frequent continuing resolutions and the sequester’s budget caps, our advantages continue to shrink. . . . If we are to sustain our military’s primacy, we need budget predictability.”
Mattis testified that a temporary extension of spending at current levels will mean that the military cannot recruit 15,000 soldiers and 4,000 airmen he says are needed to fill vacancies. Speaking before the contours of a possible two-year Senate deal emerged, he warned direly that he’ll need to ground aircraft, delay contracts and deplete ammunition supplies. “Let me be clear: as hard as the last 16 years of war have been, no enemy in the field has done more to harm the readiness of the U.S. military than the combined impact of the Budget Control Act’s defense spending caps, worsened by operating in 10 of the last 11 years under continuing resolutions of varied and unpredictable duration,” said Mattis, a former Marine general who came out of retirement to run the Pentagon.
This problem long predates Trump. The Pentagon has had to contend with the constraints of a CR in 13 of the last 18 months. For the past decade, the military has operated under a CR for at least part of the year. Mattis’s Democratic predecessor, Ash Carter, made almost identical complaintsevery time he came to Capitol Hill when Barack Obama was president.
Everyone across the ideological spectrum agrees this is a terrible way to run the government, but the inability of congressional leaders to reach meaningful compromises has made it routine.
“You know you’re eating a loaf of bread, yet you’re only being given the money to buy one slice at a time. It costs more when you buy things in small pieces,” said Max Stier, the president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, in an interview. “Congress is really responsible for failing to operate the government in a way that’s fiduciarily responsible. . . . Everyone who runs an organization ought to understand this because no other organization could run this way. . . . You need a longer runway.”
The flashpoints have been similar for years now. Defense hawks have pushed to bust the military spending caps put in place by sequestration, but more dovish Democrats say they will only go along if there is a corresponding increase in domestic spending. In other words, they want more butter in exchange for more guns. Many tea partiers in the House have been adamant that they won’t accept significant growth in discretionary spending to strengthen the safety net at home, even in exchange for more military money.
“I will remind you that the only reason we do not have a full budget agreement is because Democrats continue to hold funding for our government hostage on an unrelated issue,” Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told reporters at a news conference Tuesday. “They must stop using our troops as pawns in a game of politics!”
“Democrats have made our position in these negotiations very clear,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., replied in a floor speech. “We support an increase in funding for our military and our middle class. The two are not mutually exclusive. We don’t want to do just one and leave the other behind.”
This extended impasse is partly a lingering consequence of the failure of the “Supercommittee” in 2011. The Budget Control Act mandated caps in the event that a special bicameral group couldn’t come up with a grand bargain to curb the national debt. The idea was that draconian cuts would scare both sides into making a deal. But there was no agreement. Washington has been stuck with the sequester ever since.
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer estimates that his service alone has wasted at least $4 billion because of CRs over the past decade.”We have put $4 billion in a trash can, poured lighter fluid on it, and burned it,” he testified at a subcommittee hearing last month.
“As the commanding officer of a U.S. Navy helicopter squadron, CRs directly affected the readiness of my aircraft,” said Dan Keeler, a federal executive fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Budgetary uncertainty hits the military supply chain hard. Under a CR, spare parts are often short. Contractors and suppliers cannot start new orders until a budget is signed. Eventually, part shortages hit the fleet. We are forced to ‘cannibalize’ parts from one aircraft to make another one whole. A good widget is pulled off a down aircraft to fix another. This inefficient process doubles the amount of work and time required to conduct maintenance. This resulted in longer periods of downtime for my aircraft and reduced training opportunities for my aircrew.”
In 2011, a CR forced the Navy to cancel maintenance on the USS Gunston Hall. “The ship eventually received all deferred maintenance, but at significantly increased cost,” Keeler notes in a blog post for Brookings. “The scheduled maintenance period increased from 270 days to 696 days and costs increased from $44.7 million to $111 million. Due to the most recent rounds of CRs, the Navy delayed induction of 11 ships scheduled for shipyard maintenance this year. Maintenance delays for these ships will ultimately have impacts similar to the USS Gunston Hall.”
The system has adjusted in many ways. The brass has come to expect CRs as the new normal, so the bean counters use all the gimmicks they can to make do with inconsistent funding streams. But waste and inefficiency cannot be avoided. “You can’t expect a team to win if they only play three quarters out of four,” Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson, an admiral, said during a speech last week at the Heritage Foundation. “That’s kind of what our fiscal environment is asking us to do in many ways. . . . Working through this squanders the most precious resource: time. We’re spending time managing through this churn, rather than getting on with the strategic direction we need to maintain.”