DOD official: 2013 Pentagon budget won’t account for automatic cuts

While the Pentagon faces up to $600 billion in automatic cuts after the supercommittee failed, those cuts won’t be reflected in the 2013 budget that’s currently being prepared, a Pentagon official said Wednesday.

Mike McCord, principle deputy undersecretary of Defense, said at an aerospace and defense conference in New York that it wouldn’t be possible to account for the additional cuts before the 2013 budget is submitted.

"I think physically it would probably not be possible for us to go back to the line-item level, which is how we do the budget, and redo everything in two weeks, which is about how much time we have left," he said, according to reports from the conference.

The Pentagon is already preparing to cut $450 billion from its budget over the next decade as a result of the debt-limit deal. The automatic cuts from sequestration would tack as much as $600 billion onto the amount that must be trimmed in defense spending.

As the supercommittee neared failure, the Pentagon indicated that it wasn’t planning for the $600 billion cuts. The cuts wouldn’t take effect until January 2013, and defense hawks in Congress have vowed to reverse them.

The Pentagon is currently finishing a review of its spending to decide how to apply the $450 billion in cuts.

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