Congress Protects Pentagon Pork As The “Supercommittee” Goes Down In Flames

A meeting of the congressional supercommittee (Photo by AP -- from Washington Post)

Despite widespread public frustration and an approval rating measured in some polls as low as the single-digits, Congress is preparing for failure in its mandated bid to make a dent in the growing deficit by finding $1.2 trillion in cuts or new revenue. Mandated cuts now target defense spending, but lobbyists and their allies on Capitol Hill are prepared to shift the consequences away from the military.

All signs point to an “imminent” breakdown in negotiations between Republicans and Democrats that make up the 12-member “supercommittee” charged with putting together a deficit reduction plan. Created by the deadline debt limit deal this summer that avoided default by promising cuts in the future, the bipartisan committee had been touted by lawmakers on Capitol Hill as a supposedly reasonable means to find the right mix of cuts and revenue increases that would lower the government’s budget deficit, though the $1.2 trillion goal was not likely to have any meaningful impact.

Not surprisingly, the supercommittee quickly became bogged down by familiar partisan battles. Republicans refused to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire while centrists from both parties wanted major cuts to Medicare and Medicaid to be a part of any compromise.

With committee members from both sides of the partisan divide pointing fingers and with little progress having been made, lawmakers were ready to declare defeat on Monday and prepare for the mandated consequences to their failure.

The imminent collapse of a special deficit-reduction supercommittee on Monday promises to set off yet another round of the Washington blame game as the panel officially admits failure in its quest to sop up at least $1.2 trillion in government red ink over the coming decade.

The implosion of the supercommittee now brings into play automatic cuts written into the legislation the created the bipartisan body, totaling over $1 trillion in “across-the-board” cuts over a decade. While a host of domestic programs would face the austerity ax, most attention has gone to the nearly $500 billion in Pentagon spending reductions that would automatically kick in starting in 2013.

Threats of massive cuts to the Pentagon budget has the military and political establishment in a panic. Defense secretary Leon Panetta sounded the alarm even before Monday’s collapse of supercommittee talks, arguing that the automatic cuts would be “devastating” and put national security at a “substantial risk.”

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned Monday that if the bipartisan debt “supercommittee” fails and an across-the-board spending cut is enacted, the result will be “devastating” for the Pentagon, creating a “substantial risk” that the country’s defense needs might not be met.

The truthfulness of Panetta’s contention that spending cuts would “devastate” the military is very much in question. The past decade has seen unprecedented expansion in the Pentagon’s budget, with military spending escalating by nearly $400 billion since 2001.

The graph below illustrates the consistent yearly increase in US defense spending. (The gray bar above the blue bar is funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it goes down as those wars are scaled back. The solid blue bar representing the core of actual and projected military spending continues to rise.)

While automatic military cuts are an integral part of the fallback trigger in the event of the supercommittee’s failure, there is virtually no expectation that Congress will allow such cuts to proceed. The triggers are essentially toothless threats, allowing for few legitimate consequences now that any bipartisan agreement has been killed.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, as well as House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon, are all pursuing legislation that would wipe out the mandated reductions in the Pentagon’s annual budget. The cuts would amount to roughly $55 billion each year over ten years,  a small fraction of a military budget currently pushing $700 billion.

Sparing defense means that additional domestic spending would be targeted, leading to steep cuts to spending on education, the environment, and Medicare.

Congress is facing automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years if a 12-member Super Committee can’t agree to a package of expanded tax revenues and spending cuts, but lawmakers are looking for a way around the “sequestration” and avoid any painful reductions to their favored programs.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., say they are writing legislation to prevent what they say would be devastating cuts to the military. Democrats maintain they won’t let domestic programs be the sole source of savings.

Lawmakers have until the end of the day to get a plan out to the Congressional Budget Office to evaluate the numbers and still give two days for it to be presented by the Nov. 23 deadline. According to the plan, if a deal isn’t reached, the savings will be found by chopping half from the defense budget and half from entitlement and domestic spending programs.

With that in mind, lawmakers are looking for an end run to their own law since cuts won’t hit until 2013.

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By law, 18 percent of the automatic savings are assumed to come from interest costs the government would save from reducing the debt. If the Super Committee fails completely, out of the $1.2 trillion in automatic savings, $216 billion would be assumed interest savings.

It is a matter of political convenience that Congress quickly squash talk of military spending cuts. Republicans are continuing to promote a platform of a stronger military and increases in defense spending. And powerful defense contractors hold sway over Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to undo automatic triggers targeting the Pentagon.

Experts in the defense industry are not worried about the failure of the supercommittee, because they predict the likelihood of “sustained” military cuts over ten years is “almost nil.”

First of all, nobody seriously believes that “sequestration” is going to happen to the U.S. defense industry.

Even though the failure of the super committee to cut spending is allegedly intended to trigger automatic $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years, about half of that from defense cuts starting in fiscal 2013, this process — which has been termed “sequestration,” — has “an easy kill switch,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace and defense industry analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va.

“There are certainly valid reasons to be afraid, but the idea of this serious cut actually being implemented in this political climate is very limited,” Aboulafia said.

Not only do most Republicans oppose defense cuts, but also the defense industry is too big and too important and too politically connected, on both sides of the aisle, for its funding to be drastically cut. Moreover, Congress appears far too dysfunctional to do what it said it would do, particularly something that it clearly, from day one, had no intention of doing.

“Even if there were to be full sequestration trigger, the probability that these cuts would be sustained over a 10-year period is almost nil,” said BB&T Capital Markets analyst Carter Leake.

The influence of money from companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin pured into the campaign coffers of the very lawmakers that are left to enforce the automatic triggers reinforces the opinion that military cuts will be taken out of the deal.

In the 2011-2012 period alone, according to data from Open Secrets, Lockheed Martin and Boeing have dedicated nearly $2 million in contributions to candidates and their PAC’s.

Republican Rep. Buck McKeon, the man that pledged to fight against the “dismantling of the greatest armed forces in history,” has received  $337,000 in contributions from the defense industry, the most of any single member of Congress.

In total, defense corporations  have spent almost $6 million on political contributions in the current election cycle alone. That total also includes over $100,000 in contributions to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.