The Defense budget showdown.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: Budget Matters

* Funding for the Defense Department in fiscal year 2016 remains clouded with uncertainty as President Barack Obama and the GOP continue to spar over the federal budget.

Both sides essentially agree on how much money the Pentagon should get.

For 2016, Obama requested $534 billion for DoD's base budget plus an additional $51 billion for overseas contingency operations, for a total of $585 billion. The president's base budget request blasts through the sequestration caps that limit base spending to approximately $498 billion.

In their respective National Defense Authorization Acts, the Republican-controlled House and Senate left the sequestration caps in place for defense and non-defense discretionary spending. However, they essentially maneuvered around the limits on defense by beefing up OCO funding--which does not count toward the caps--to about $89 billion. The big OCO boost would yield an authorization of approximately $585 billion. The House and Senate appropriations committees took a similar approach in their bills.

The White House has criticized the use of OCO money to get around budget caps and threatened to veto the GOP-driven legislation if Congress doesn't lift spending caps for both defense and non-defense discretionary spending.

"The president has been clear that he is not willing to... accept fixes to defense without fixing non-defense," the White House said in a June statement about the Republican-driven legislation.

A government shutdown looms if the parties can't reach an agreement or pass a short-term continuing resolution to fund federal agencies by Oct. 1, the beginning of the next fiscal year. But analysts see that outcome as unlikely in light of the political fallout from the 2013 shutdown.

"The bar to having just a continuing resolution is not that high," said Ryan Crotty, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.G, think tank. "The experience of the government shutdown last time lends me to believe that if it gets up to the 11th hour, a [short term] CR remains pretty easy and that that will be what happens."

Pentagon officials are hoping that some sort of...