Republicans Seek To Undo The Same Military Cuts They Had Already Agreed To

In spite of a potential presidential veto, a group of Republican senators want to overturn deep cuts to U.S. military spending that they and their GOP colleagues had agreed to just months ago as part of last summer's agreement to reduce the federal debt and deficit.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other Senate Republicans are unveiling legislation that would protect the Pentagon’s budget from the budget cuts -- known as "sequestration" -- which were required in the debt deal.

Congressional Republicans had agreed to $492 billion in cuts to U.S. defense spending as part of the Budget Control Act approved last summer and signed by President Obama in August to resolve last year's long and torturous battle over raising the federal debt limit.

However, many Republicans and those in the military establishment immediately began to complain about those cuts once the so-called "supercommittee" failed in November to come up with an alternate plan to tame the federal budget. Once the supercommittee failed to act, the defense cuts became automatic under the budget-control law. The automatic defense and domestic-spending cuts are to begin in the next federal fiscal year, for 2013.

However, McCain's “Down Payment to Protect National Security Act of 2012,” would replace the across-the-board federal spending cuts for 2013 by savings derived from a federal employee pay freeze and employee attrition.

The bill would extend the current federal employee pay freeze though June 2014, and restrict federal hiring to only two employees for every three leaving, until the size of the federal government workforce is reduced by 5 percent, according to a statement from McCain's office.

Obama last fall, however, threatened to veto "any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending."

Although those on the left never expressed enthusiasm for the budget law overall, they've seen the mandatory cuts to the Pentagon budget as a silver lining.

A prominent progressive leader immediately denounced McCain's legislation.

“Republicans believe bloated Pentagon budgets strengthen American security. In fact, the reverse is true. The most important security priority for America is making the investments here at home vital to reviving our economy, modernizing our infrastructure, educating our children, and getting our fiscal house in order. To achieve this, we need to reduce unnecessary spending –- and there is no greater source of that than the Pentagon,” says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign For America's Future, a Washington progressive policy shop.

“The Cold War is over. Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda dispersed. The U.S. cannot and should not police the world. The Pentagon now spends almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. It is the largest source of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government,” Borosage says. “The Pentagon budget more than doubled over the past decade, bringing total U.S. defense spending to historically high levels not seen since World War II. It’s higher in comparable dollars than it was under Ronald Reagan in the midst of the Cold War.

“We can and should reduce our military spending, revise our forces to fit the new world we live in,” he adds. “Even after the full sequester, the U.S. will retain by far the most powerful –- and expensive -– military in the world. These Senators would weaken our security, not strengthen it. They are defending the entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, warned us about, not the real security of the American people.”


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