Budget Numbers Add Up to Possible Sequestration.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: BUDGET MATTERS

President Donald Trump's 2020 budget request is drawing fire from Democrats, raising doubts that any agreement on defense spending can be reached before the start of the next fiscal year.

The administration asked for a defense topline of $750 billion, including a whopping $164 billion in overseas contingency operations spending and another $9 billion in "emergency" spending largely aimed at funding Trump's border wall initiative. It also called for cuts in non-defense discretionary spending.

"What the president sent over... is dead on arrival," House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said at a recent conference hosted by McAleese & Associates and Credit Suisse.

Much criticism has been directed toward the enormous amount of money proposed for the overseas contingency operations account, which is intended to pay for war efforts or other crises. Defense Department budget documents identified $98 billion of the OCO request as actually going toward base budget needs. Critics are referring to the $98 billion as "fake OCO."

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said the White House appears to be trying to keep the 2011 Budget Control Act caps in place for non-defense programs while getting around them for the military using OCO accounts, which are not limited by the BCA caps.

"How does the White House work its way back to something sensible?" he said. "If they don't, we are staring at possibly another shutdown or best-case scenario, another [continuing resolution] and delayed defense budget."

Rick Berger, a defense budget analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Senate Budget Committee staffer, said the Trump request is "a nonstarter" on Capitol Hill. When a fiscal agreement is eventually reached, he expects the OCO number to be more in line with what it has been in recent years, perhaps somewhere in the $55 billion to $65 billion range.

Another highly contentious issue is the inclusion of funding for Trump's promised border wall in the defense budget proposal. About $3.6 billion in the "emergency" account would go toward wall construction while another $3.6 billion would be to backfill military construction projects that didn't receive money in 2019 because the administration reprogrammed funding to help pay for the wall.

Political fighting between Democrats and...