The House of Representatives approved Wednesday a $577.9 defense appropriations billion for fiscal 2017 by a vote of 233-185, with three Republicans against the legislation and five Democrats in favor.
The House Appropriations Committee last week introduced the bill, which funds the Defense Department at a level $5.2 billion higher than the fiscal 2016 enacted level and $1.6 billion more than former President Barack Obama’s request for the budget year ending Sept. 30.
The appropriations legislation proposes $516.1 billion in base discretionary funding and $61.8 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations spending. Congress appropriated $514.1 billion in base funding and $58.6 billion for OCO in fiscal 2016.
“The bill closely reflects the Defense Appropriations bill the House passed last summer, and is consistent with the final National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017,” the House Appropriations Committee said in a press release. Obama signed the fiscal 2017 NDAA last December, shortly before leaving office. The latest appropriations bill now moves on to the Senate for consideration.
An explanatory statement accompanying the bill – the result of a conference agreement between the House and Senate – noted that as part of the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons modernization program, both the budget request and the final bill would grant $113.9 million for the Air Force’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program and $95.6 million for the service’s Long-Range Standoff nuclear cruise missile. Intercontinental ballistic missiles would receive $113.7 million and the Navy’s Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine would receive $773.1 million.
The Trump administration expressed support for the legislation in a Tuesday statement.
The federal government through April 28 is operating under a short-term budget resolution that has frozen federal funding at fiscal 2016 levels. The stopgap funding bill provided some exceptions from the funding freeze to certain Pentagon programs. One of those is the Columbia-class submarine program; Congress included it in a provision allowing shipbuilding work to proceed to avoid schedule and cost delays.
President Donald Trump is expected to release his budget fiscal 2018 plan for the federal government by the middle of this month.
