After four days of congressional testimony on the Pentagon’s fiscal 2018 budget request, three things are clear, at least among members of the four defense committees:
The U.S. military desperately needs a cash infusion to reverse a dangerous decline in readiness; the mandatory budget caps imposed by Congress must be lifted; and everyone loves Jim Mattis.
“We rest better at night knowing you are in charge of the policy,” said Rep. Nita Lowey, a Democrat, at Thursday’s House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. “Amen to that,” Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican, quickly piped in.
Mattis was showered with praise and adulation at all four Capitol Hill hearings he visited this week. But at the final hearing, Chairwoman Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, gave Mattis a friendly lecture along with the plaudits, and offered some polite but firm marching orders.
Granger pleaded with Mattis to stop preaching to the choir and instead spend some of his personal capital converting other members of Congress to his cause of lifting spending caps.
“Any way you can reach out. You have such presence. People respect you. They look to you for the answers,” Granger said. “If you will reach out to those who are not on the four committees making these decisions it would make our possibilities much better.”
Mattis spent much of the week faulting Congress for failing to pass a budget on time or to eliminate the threat of sequestration, imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011.
“Congress as a whole has met the present challenge with lassitude, not leadership,” he scolded all of the committees in his opening statement.
Push-back from lawmakers was minimal, and many shared Mattis’ frustration over the inability of Congress to rid the budget process of the constraints of artificial spending limits.
But Granger suggested it is up to Mattis to make the case, especially to Democrats who won’t vote to end the spending limits on the military, without a corresponding increase in domestic spending.
Despite the bipartisan consensus that another stopgap continuing resolution that would lock in spending to last year’s levels would be a disaster, many members ruefully conceded that’s where the deeply divided Congress seems to be heading.
“At the end of the day, there’s only one or two outcomes this year,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. “We’re either going to have a continuing resolution, or we are going to have a negotiated bipartisan agreement.
Cole argued it’s time for Republicans to deal with Democrats who want more domestic spending. “If we don’t get to a good number in the non-defense area we will inevitably end up doing something that nobody on either side of the aisle wants to do,” Cole said.
Mattis testified that a continuing resolution would put significant limitations on what the Pentagon can do to adapt to a fast-changing world with new threats from drones, hypersonic weapons and cyberattacks, noting he cannot under a CR start any new program that doesn’t already exist and is currently funded.
“Under a continuing resolution I can do zero about new starts to address the changing character of war,” Mattis said.
