Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has asked commanders to cut some $52 billion in anticipation that Congress will not be able to avert cuts in defense spending that are part of the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations, according to The Washington Post.
“We have no idea what . . . is going to happen,” Panetta said Thursday. “We simply cannot sit back now and not be prepared for the worst.”
The total sequestration cuts are just over $500 billion over the next decade, however this year’s cuts would have to be in place before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, meaning the Pentagon has only seven months to carefully trim its budget without affecting national security.
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Currently, the military is focusing on freezing civilian hiring and cutting operating costs on bases, which could include anything from cutting the grass less often to moving, consolidating or scaling back on certain operations and weapons development programs.
Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said on Jan. 7 that the Department of Defense has some wiggle room in how it makes the initial round of cuts, partially because with operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, there already are some savings happening on their own, according to Defense Daily.
Many of the initial cuts, he said, could come on the investment and development areas of the military’s budget because drawing down the size of military personnel itself is a more complicated issue.
“I think there’s a long history and good reason why--early in a (military) drawdown--the cuts tend to be heavily on the investment portion of the budget, because it takes us a while to make force-level decisions and then to gradually draw down the size of our forces,” Hale said. “So if we are allowed the authority to make choices, they’ll probably be investment-heavy in the beginning, with more reductions in the operating costs after a couple of years when we can make force changes.”
The expectation is that cuts will be spread through as many of the 2,500 investment projects the military is currently involved in, in order to minimize impact either to the projects themselves or national security, he said.
Hale said that at the outset budget officials would look to move money around in its operations and maintenance accounts, relying first on furloughs of civilian employees - cuts that need to be decided ahead of time to minimize what will need to be done.
“You have to make sensible assumptions,” Hale said, because members of Congress still have yet to approve Air Force aircraft retirements, re-basing requests or personnel cuts. The roughly 800,000 civilian employees of the military are the easiest to consider for furloughs first because it does not need congressional approval.
Specific cuts have already been ordered by Panetta on training, travel, office expenses and conferences, and authority has already been given for temporary workers to be let go.
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“I think we will be forced to consider furloughs because we have to get money out of the operations and maintenance accounts quickly, and we’ll be a quarter of the way through the fiscal year when this goes into effect,” Hale said. “I would, unfortunately, expect it to be fairly widespread because we’re going to need the money to comply with the law.”
Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said last year that he sees room in the budget to cut non-national security items.
“If you look at spending $80 million on NASCAR, $37 million on the Blue Angels, $70 billion in Europe,” Kingston told The Hill. “That doesn’t sound like an impoverished budget.”
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