(Washington, D.C) – The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation released today a detailed budget analysis in response to the Obama administration’s release of its Fiscal Year 2012 defense spending request.
House lays waste to Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Budget
As feared, the GOP-controlled House introduced a Continuing Resolution (CR) on Friday to fund the federal government for the last seven months of the year that erases (and then some) the critical increases in NNSA’s FY 2011 budget request for threat reduction and nonproliferation programs. The CR actually reduces funding for NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Non-Proliferation account below FY 2010 appropriations, which were already far too low to achieve NNSA’s nuclear security goals.
Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
Even NNSA’s weapons activities account was not exempt from cuts.
Aware of the writing on the wall, House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Ranking Member Pete Visclosky (D-IN) reminded his colleagues of what’s at stake earlier this week:
I’d remind my colleagues that almost half of the monies that flow through the Energy and Water Subcommittee are defense-related. A lot of that is our nuclear programs, as well as nonproliferation. We went to war in 2003 because it asserted Saddam Hussein had materials of weapons of mass destruction.
It would be so much better for the world and our country, and so much more cost-effective, if we made an investment up front on nonproliferation so we did not face those types of draconian decisions in the future and do hope in all of our subcommittees in this committee, we do recognize we have to make that investment and we make wise choices as we do make cuts.
We’ll have more to say about this in the coming days and weeks as the CR moves through the House floor and ultimately to the Senate.
It’s now up to Senate Democrats and Republicans, primed by a strong, strong push from the administration, to ensure that the effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials within four years doesn’t get derailed.
European Missile Defenses: Following in the Inept Shoes of National Missile Defense?
The knock on United States National Missile Defense based in Alaska and California is that it never has been proved to work in real-world situations. Billions of dollars have been spent on that system, now called “ground-based mid-course,” but there is no sure evidence that the defense would work should North Korea launch nuclear-tipped missiles against us.
Because of the powerful political backing for the program, missile defense has avoided the commonsense “Fly Before You Buy” mantra that prevents billions from being wasted on weapons that may eventually prove ineffective.
According to a recent report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), the government auditing agency, the Obama Administration is risking repeating history with its proposed missile defense systems in Europe.
The Bush Administration hid the true costs of National Missile Defense and avoided close scrutiny by using a policy it labeled “spiral development” – which probably should have stood for spiraling costs.
The Obama Administration’s new label is “phased adaptive approach.” According to the GAO, there are more questions than answers about the new plan.
To review the bidding, on September 17, 2009, President Obama announced a new approach for missile defense in Europe while canceling the Bush-planned system for establishing a third site for National Missile Defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. The revised system, to be deployed in phases of an increasingly capable system, was called “European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA). The Administration argued that the new system could be deployed sooner against a nearer term threat and more comprehensively than the previous approach.
The first interceptors would be designed to protect U.S. forces deployed in Europe and our European allies against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles launched by Iran. Eventually, a matured system would help defend against longer-range threats.
The original interceptor deployments would take place on Aegis ships as early as 2011. Phase 2 is scheduled for 2015, including an Aegis defense system on land in Romania. In 2018, there would be more deployment in Poland and then a long-range defense by 2020.
NATO recently endorsed the territorial missile defense system, although it has yet to reach agreement on how to implement the new mission.
However, the missile defense agency is still exempt from rigorous standards. The GAO notes that: “MDA [Missile Defense Agency] continues to be exempted from DOD’s traditional joint requirements determination, acquisition, and associated oversight processes.”
In other words, there is no way to judge success if there are no clear requirements and goals except those defined by the agency with the most stake it defining the system as a success.
The GAO continues: “DOD does not have the information it needs to assess whether the EPAA schedule is realistic and achievable, identify potential problems,
or analyze how changes will impact the execution of this effort, and therefore is exposed to increased schedule, performance, and cost risks.”
As with National Missile Defense, the Pentagon may follow the proposed schedule and spend billions with no idea whether the system will really work. Pentagon does not yet have an overall cost estimate, according to the GAO. “DOD has not yet developed EPAA life-cycle cost estimates and has indicated that it is unlikely to do so because EPAA is considered a policy designed to maximize flexibility. As a result, DOD does not have a basis from which to assess EPAA’s affordability and cost-effectiveness and is missing a tool with which to monitor implementation progress.”
The GAO adds: “Without life-cycle cost estimates DOD may not be able to determine whether its revised approach to BMD in Europe is fiscally sustainable and affordable.”
In other words, the United States may be buying more pigs in pokes with no ability to reply on the new system during a crisis.
By rushing forward with many aspects of the program, the GAO notes, the system will may have challenges in getting all its parts working together: “EPAA’s phases are not yet integrated with key acquisition activities and so are exposed to risk of schedule slips, decreased performance, and increased cost”.
Now none of these criticisms should phase [pun intended] Republicans, who have long embraced missile defense whether or not the system has been proved to work.
These Republicans are modern-day Potemkin-ites. According to history/myths, Russian minister Grigory Potyomkin had hollow facades of villages constructed along the Dnieper River in order to impress Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787.
The modern-day equivalent is the hollow missile defenses in Alaska and California. The new Obama plan is running the same risk as the West Coast system.
The Administration should slow down, set realistic goals, come up with a definitive cost estimate, and test the hell out of the system.
Cuts are coming: Will the entire budget be on the table?
As expected, President Obama’s address last night focused heavily on the deficit. Most points we saw coming:
So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. (Applause.) Now, this would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was President.
This freeze will require painful cuts. Already, we’ve frozen the salaries of hardworking federal employees for the next two years. I’ve proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs. The Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without. (Applause.)
(For a translation of that last part, on Defense, see Josh Rogin’s post at The Cable or mine yesterday.)
More importantly, though, in terms of the budget, the President’s speech contained lines like this:
Now, most of the cuts and savings I’ve proposed only address annual domestic spending, which represents a little more than 12 percent of our budget. To make further progress, we have to stop pretending that cutting this kind of spending alone will be enough. It won’t. (Applause.)
The bipartisan fiscal commission I created last year made this crystal clear. I don’t agree with all their proposals, but they made important progress. And their conclusion is that the only way to tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we find it –- in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending, and spending through tax breaks and loopholes. (Applause.)
Today, the Congressional Budget Office raised its estimate of the budget deficit to $1.5 trillion for this year, on track to beat out the previous record of $1.4 trillion, set in 2009.
House majority leader Eric Cantor, House budget chairman Paul Ryan and others have echoed the president’s insistence that the entire budget be on the table. It has yet to be seen what, if anything, will come of these statements. No doubt, cuts are coming. The question is where.
Security Spending Conspicuously Absent from Budget Cut Proposals
By now, you’ve probably heard that the theme of tonight’s State of the Union will undoubtedly be the economy. The President is expected to propose a five year freeze on non-security discretionary spending (déjà vu?) and a ban on earmarks, while Rep. Paul Ryan, who is no doubt practicing his best Reagan impression in front of the mirror as we speak, is gearing up to deliver the Republican response.
Meanwhile, House Republicans hoping to go into the evening with a little extra rhetorical firepower spent the day working to pass another bill because they said they would. The measure, passed 256-165, would permit Rep. Ryan to reduce all non-security discretionary spending to fiscal 2008 levels or below, but it is another hortatory exercise that is not going anywhere.
Left or right, though, one thing is certain, most proposals have been carefully crafted to exclude “security spending”: Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs.
CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller reports via Twitter that the President will call for $78 billion in defense cuts over the next five years. One would assume this means he will echo Secretary Gates’ recent announcement citing the same numbers.
The problem here is that the term “cut” is used very loosely in Gates’ plan for the defense budget.
Last year’s $100 billion efficiencies initiative was never meant to reduce the Pentagon’s budget, nor contribute to deficit reduction. Rather, it was meant to reduce Pentagon waste and boost more important mission-critical projects, since the entire $100 billion would be reinvested in DoD. More importantly, though, it was meant to stave off the harsh and inevitable reality that eventually, the Pentagon may have actually to reduce its budget.
Unfortunately for Gates, the Obama Administration was not satisfied. When Jacob Lew took over as the new director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), he directed Gates to trim $150 billion more, and would not allow the Defense Department to keep the savings.
Gates eventually negotiated the $150 billion figure down to $78 billion, the same $78 billion President Obama is expected to discuss tonight, but as Gordon Adams points out in his remarks to The Cable, the math is a little fuzzy:
…because Gates’ $78 billion in cuts aren’t really cuts at all. $54 billion comes from the president’s announcement to freeze federal civilian worker pay. So Gates is capitalizing on Obama’s decision without making any additional sacrifices…
Another $14 billion comes from “shifts in economic assumptions… for example, decreases in the inflation rate and projected pay raises,” Gates said. Adams explained that means the Pentagon simply changed its figure for projected inflation, which changes how much it predicts everything will cost in the future.
Moreover, in Gates’ proposed cuts, the Pentagon’s base budget will not actually go down at any point in the next five years. It will instead amount to slower growth that will eventually stop, and then begin to grow again. This is considered a reduction only because the budget will eventually stop growing with the rate of inflation, so further waste will have to be cut.
The president’s fiscal 2012 budget request, to be released on February 14 or 15, is expected to include $554 billion in base Pentagon funding (not including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), $12 billion less than the Pentagon had planned before negotiating with the White House, but $5 billion more than last year’s request.
What does this all mean in reality: domestic discretionary programs are told to go on a strict diet to lose 30 pounds while the Pentagon is supposed to cut down from two cupcakes a day to one.