Repealing the Budget Control Act Long Overdue.

• Author: Hallman, Wesley
• Position: NDIA Perspective

Due to a publishing deadline, we didn't have the opportunity to analyze what readers of National Defense will have already seen in the details of the administration's budget proposal. We can say the proposed $750 billion topline number for defense is a good next step in the long process of regaining military readiness while investing in modernization and recapitalization.

By all accounts that topline includes needed investments in personnel, training, research and development, acquisitions and sustainment. But that topline and its passage by normal order face significant headwinds, making last year's example of normal order an anomaly. These headwinds could delay authorization and appropriations that, at best, would return the Defense Department to operations under wasteful continuing resolutions or, worse, another government shutdown. Either outcome imperils recent readiness gains and significantly disrupts service plans, while instilling more uncertainty for the defense industrial base upon which warfighters depend.

The headwinds facing the normal-order passage of the National Defense Authorization Act and the defense appropriations by the first of October begin with the lack of a bipartisan budget agreement setting agreed upon toplines for defense spending and domestic discretionary spending. The lack of such an agreement means that if either of those two broad categories of spending exceed ceilings laid out in the 2011 Budget Control Act, then automatic, across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration, are implemented without regard for or consideration of priority, need or strategy--essentially cuts made by a meat cleaver rather than a scalpel.

Warfighters are still dealing with the consequences of the 2013 sequester, broad cuts that grounded Air Force squadrons, caused Army readiness to plummet, and deferred Navy ship maintenance. Politicians never expected sequestration to take effect because projected outcomes created so much carnage --Democrats and Republicans would find a way to create and pass a "Grand Bargain" to reduce deficits through spending cuts and revenue increases.

Instead, the budget process became a game of chicken with neither side swerving, and the nation lost when sequestration hit. Unfortunately, we seem headed toward another game of chicken as each side stakes out a collision course on budget caps with warfighters and U.S. national security getting crushed if politicians don't swerve to avoid a crash.

In an...