The 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) has been no friend to the Department of Defense. Since its passage, the department has experienced sequestration, shutdown, furloughs and more. The resulting turmoil has harmed mission effectiveness, especially in 2013 when sequestration reduced training funds, said Todd Harrison, of the Center for Security and International Studies.
The law’s effects have forced DoD to waste taxpayer dollars, including $400 million paid to DoD civilians for the days during the 2013 shutdown when they were not permitted to work. Defense officials said the turmoil has also wasted much senior-leader time which would have been better spent on projects to improve DoD’s effectiveness.
And yet for all the talk of the BCA as “fiscal castration,” Congress has fallen into a routine of easing the law’s budget caps, allowing the department to find ways to stay below them. “We all know all the bad things about the BCA, particularly sequestration — when they had to do across-the-board cuts — but the good thing about it is it has refocused the department on getting more efficient, and it has established a floor for the defense budget,” Harrison said. “No one’s really talking about going below the caps, and they provide DoD with a pretty high degree of certainty around funding. DoD can be pretty sure they’re not getting any less than these budget caps. It actually has created some certainty.”
Politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to call for the repeal of “sequestration” — the automatic cuts triggered if the budget caps are exceeded. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton lamented at a campaign event in August, “The sequester makes our country less secure,” and, “We cannot impose arbitrary limits on something as important as our military. That makes no sense at all.” Weeks ago, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running-mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, told Fox News that he and Trump were “deeply committed to rebuilding our military and ending those automatic cuts in the Department of Defense that are in place,” a prospect he said would be no problem with Republican majorities in both chambers.
With the Nov. 8 election looming, not only are those majorities an uncertain prospect, but Pence glossed over divisions between budget hawks and military hawks in the GOP, which muddy the likelihood of repeal. The conservative Heritage Foundation in 2015 lauded the BCA for shrinking government, sparking jobs growth and a decrease in federal outlays from $3.603 trillion in 2011 to $3.506 trillion in 2014. And the conservative House Freedom Caucus has repeatedly fought efforts to ease BCA caps—though how formidable it will be after the election is an open question, too.
This article is part of a larger Defense News 30-year anniversary project, showcasing the people, programs and innovations from the last three decades that most shaped the global security arena. Go to defensenews.com/30th to see all of our coverage.
