Defense budget sought to add $5B already approved
Weapons, personnel money was in earlier spending agreement.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration wants Congress to add $30 billion to its fiscal 2017 Defense spending bill, but about $5.2 billion of the proposed addition is already in the bill, according to a Senate committee.
CQ Roll Call disclosed on March 20 that the administration’s $30 billion supplemental request for the Pentagon contained more than $3 billion in ship and aircraft programs that were already in the House-Senate agreement that the House passed earlier this month and that awaits Senate action.
A Senate Appropriations Committee aide confirmed for CQ Roll Call on March 24 that the total amount in military procurement programs that the White House wants added to the bill — even though it is already there — is $3.3 billion.
What’s more, the aide s a i d, t he admini s t r at i on has sought another $2 billion or so that Congress is already poised to provide. Included there is an addition of $1.6 billion to cover hiring of more U.S. military personnel than President Barack Obama had sought, plus another $285 million to cover a higher pay raise than he had wanted.
T h o s e t wo p a r c e l s o f money were needed in the a ppropr i a t i ons measure because the increases in people and pay are mandated by the fiscal 2017 defense authorization law, which was enacted in December.
Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, had noted the $5 billion overst atement in the request during a March 22 hearing.
“Congress has a l re ady addressed $5 billion of the requested funds in the pending defense appropriations bill,” Durbin said in his opening statement.
But apart from CQ’s earlier report on the duplicative procurement request, the full breakdown of that $5 billion overst atement has not been previ ously disclosed.
It is unusual, to say the least, for an administration to ask Congress to add funds to a bill when the money is already in the bill. The a d mi n i s t r a t i o n h a d t wo weeks to make note of the redundancies — the period between the disclosure of the spending bill’s contents and the submission of the supplemental on March 16.
Officials with the Defense Department comptroller’s office have said they are working with appropriators to “deconflict” the request and the bill.
If administration officials in the Pentagon or White House were aware that their supplemental request was excessive before or during its release, they did not let on publicly.
In events unveiling the $30 billion request on March 16, officials did not disclose that more than one-sixth of it would not need to be added to the pending bill. In fact, they called attention to the need to cover higher troop numbers, a bigger pay raise and boosts to certain weapons orders — all of which are in the bill.