“It seems at this point, we’ll need to wait for a new administration for a real fix,” said Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. (CSBA).<\/span> “There was a lot of hope with the new Republican Congress, they’d be able to break the logjam and find a solution. But now it’s jammed up more than ever.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Defense Secretary Ashton<\/span> Carter last week lashed out against the House-passed resolution, saying it would “fail to solve the problem [of sequestration] while also undermining basic principles of accountability and long term planning.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also criticized members for leaving in place the caps, noting the resolution also would fail to save the agencies that the Pentagon works with overseas \u2014 the State Department, Treasury and Homeland Security \u2014 from sequestration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I cannot and will not be indifferent to cuts threatening” those departments, Carter said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If other agencies lose money in the 2016 budget season, “the risks will accrue to our troops” in the field just as if his own department’s budget was cut, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Harrison suggested that even with the caps, things will not be that bad for the Defense Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’re not going to see the previous problems. There aren’t going to be furloughs and training cancellations,” Harrison said. “The money in OCO is flexible. Yes, there are some restrictions. But if you have $35 billion more there, you can find ways to appropriate money for other things. It’s a shell game.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s exactly what the House GOP defense hawks, who secured a budget resolution that defied deficit-minded conservatives by not requiring the extra war funding to be offset with other federal cuts, intend to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’re going to mark it. \u2026 We’re going to change the way it’s used,” House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., told reporters last week. “It’s OCO but it’s not going to be OCO.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n — Leo Shane III and Paul McLeary contributed.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What to do about spending caps is one issue House and Senate negotiators can skip as they craft a compromise 2016 federal budget blueprint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":43743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":8,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[8,33,19],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1090],"class_list":["post-20486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-congress","category-home","category-pentagon"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"LHL276TA3JBFZFRSRETBUUHU3A","arc_canonical_url":"\/congress\/2015\/03\/30\/budgets-signal-spending-caps-here-to-stay\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2890968.jpg.jpg\")