Both political parties and President Obama have been embracing the mantra of slashing government spending as a wave of austerity spills over Washington, but a group of powerful Republicans in Congress are telling Defense Secretary Robert Gates to put the brakes on his own spending cut initiative.
House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) and other top Republicans on military committees wrote a letter to Secretary Gates telling him to reconsider the biggest of his proposed cuts; canceling production on an “Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle” for the Marine Corps.
McKeon and his GOP colleagues admonished Gates that his unilateral cost cutting would “undercut Congress” and that it would be up to the legislative body to determine what “efficiency” could be found in the Pentagon’s budget.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon and his seven subcommittee chiefs are urging Defense Secretary Robert Gates to avoid formally stopping all work on the Marines Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.
In a letter to Gates obtained by The Hill, the top eight HASC Republicans asked the Defense secretary to not take “precipitous action” on any program to which he earlier this month proposed major changes or immediate termination. Such moves, the committee leaders wrote, would “undercut Congress’ ability to pass judgment on the recommendations.”
Gates announced Jan. 6 that the Marines were canceling the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) program because it has become too expensive. The cancellation is among a number of moves announced by Gates to cut the Pentagon’s budget by $78 billion over the next five years.
Industry sources say General Dynamics expects to get the order to cease all work on the vehicles within the next few weeks.
If DoD issues a stop-work order to prime contractor General Dynamics and other EFV suppliers, it would “cease the program before the House Armed Services Committee and other congressional defense committees have had the opportunity to review the analysis and other documentation that led to the” proposal,” the Armed Services leaders wrote.
Such a congressional review would allow lawmakers to determine whether ending the program “is in fact an efficiency’,’ and/or is in the best interest of our national security,” the group wrote.
They requested that Gates hold off on issuing the order until the congressional defense panels have had time to scrub all of his cost-cutting proposals.
Axing the Marine Corps’ vehicle was the main component of nearly $100 billion in spending cuts over five years that Gates outlined for the Pentagon to gain hold over a budget that is still scheduled to grow over that period when inflation is taken into account.
A factor in McKeon’s letter to Gates and his hostility to cutting the unwanted Marine Corps vehicle could be his ties to General Dynamics, the defense contractor tasked with building the proposed “EFV.” Rep. McKeon received $20,000 in campaign contributions from General Dynamics towards his reelection bid last year, putting him inside the top five recipients of campaign cash from the industrial giant.
The hesitation by establishment Republicans to remove the military budget from immunity in the rush to trim government spending could also lead to a clash with their more radical “Tea Party” political base. Several top “Tea Party” lawmakers and organizers have expressly called on Republicans in Congress to include the Pentagon in their plans for massive federal budget reductions.
One “Tea Party” leader said that military spending “must be on the table” for Republicans and Democrats.
“The widely held sentiment among Tea Party Patriot members is that every item in the budget, including military spending and foreign aid, must be on the table,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. “It is time to get serious about preserving the country for our posterity. The mentality that certain programs are ‘off the table’ must be taken off the table.”
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, leaders of the group FreedomWorks, recently wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that “defense spending should not be exempt from scrutiny.” On Gates’ proposed savings of $145 billion over five years, they said, “That’s a start.”
But it has been a less than positive start for Republican leaders in the House. Their current budget cut proposal that guts $2.5 trillion in federal spending over the next decade does not touch the Pentagon or the billions spent every week on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead taking out programs like Amtrak and public broadcasting.
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