The U.S. Senate on Thursday passed a budget caps deal that officially set defense funding toplines for the next two years, essentially doing away with future budget cuts via sequestration.
H.R. 3877 sets the defense spending topline at $738 billion in fiscal 2020 and at $741.5 billion in fiscal 2021. The 2020 level is significantly less than the $750 billion topline the Senate approved in its version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Nonetheless, top defense policy makers in the upper chamber, such as Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.), supported the bill.
The bill passed by a vote of 67-28. The House approved the measure on July 25, by a vote of 284-149. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signed the bill Thursday afternoon on Capitol Hill before it was sent to the White House, where President Trump is expected to quickly sign it.
The caps deal provides $2.5 billion more in base defense spending than 2020 federal budget legislation the House of Representatives has already approved.
Pending passage of actual appropriation legislation by the Senate, the caps deal does not alter the fiscal 2020 budget outlook for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management. Under the minibus appropriations bill passed by the House in June, funding for DOE nuclear cleanup would remain flat at about $7.2 billion. That is still $706 million more than the Trump administration request.
To reach its requested budget for 2020, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would have to grab a 25% share of the extra funding.
The NNSA will either have to compete with the entire Pentagon for that money, get it from elsewhere in the Department of Energy, or make do with less funding than it wanted.
In its 2020 Energy and Water budget bill, passed as part of a multi-bill minibus, the House rejected the administration’s proposal to increase funding for the NNSA while decreasing funding for other DOE programs. The NNSA got $15.9 billion in that bill, some $600 million below the agency’s request.
The Senate has yet to write any appropriations bills for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 and will not do so until returning from its annual August recess, which began Friday.
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and its defense subcommittee, told reporters Thursday that draft appropriation bill discussions should begin shortly after recess ends, on Sept. 9.
As the House did, Shelby wants to approve 2020 appropriations bills in multi-bill, minibus bundles. That reduces the amount of time members spend debating the measures in committee.
In the Senate, 23 Republicans and five Democrats voted against the caps bill, while five senators did not vote.
Senate Armed Services Committee members who voted against the bill were: Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).
Senators who did not vote include Democratic presidential nominees Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as well as Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.).
While the budget deal does remove the threat of the U.S. government undergoing sequestration for the last two years imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, it does not entirely stave off the possibility of a continuing resolution, should Congress prove unable to come to agreements on its spending bills before the next budget year begins.
This story first appeared in Weapons Complex Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily. Dan Leone, staff reporter for Exchange Monitor, contributed to this story from Washington.
