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Week ahead: Defense bill hits home stretch
House and Senate defense lawmakers are on the cusp of wrapping up a key piece of legislative business before Congress heads home for the holidays.
Congressional conferees and their staffs are nearly finished on a compromise version of the Pentagon's budget plan for fiscal 2012. A final draft of the legislation could arrive on President Obama's desk as soon as this week.
Getting the department's spending blueprint finalized by Congress was one of several legislative priorities laid out by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for the lame-duck session on Capitol Hill.
Concerns on Capitol Hill over whether Congress was in danger of not passing a Department of Defense authorization bill during this legislative year were quashed earlier this month, when the Senate finally approved its version of the $631 billion spending package.
The unanimous Senate continued the chamber’s record of successfully passing a Pentagon budget bill uninterrupted for the last 51 years, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said after passage.
However, the process hit a snag in the lower chamber when House members postponed a key vote to move the defense bill to conference.
The delay, due to parliamentary issues surrounding provisions in the Senate’s bill that could be considered “revenue originators,” pushed congressional approval of the compromise bill into this week.
While the legislation is expected to wrap up this week, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle remain at loggerheads in the ongoing debate in Congress on how to avoid sequestration and the so-called "fiscal cliff."
Both sides have made progress, most recently with President Obama meeting with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) last Thursday on Capitol Hill. While both men remained mum on what was discussed during their powwow, each side agreed that time was quickly running out to find a bipartisan solution.
Democrats remain fixed on their calls for tax increases on Americans in the top tax brackets as a way to avert the $1.2 billion in automatic budget cuts set for January, under the White House's sequestration plan. Nearly half of those cuts will be taken out of defense coffers.
However, Republicans are adamant that any tax increases must be paired up with deep cuts in spending for various social welfare and entitlement programs.
For their part, top defense industry executives last week pressed GOP lawmakers to strongly consider tax increases in order to spare the cuts to the Pentagon budget reductions, which they argue would devastate the U.S. defense sector.
"We may not get a grand bargain in the next 28 days," Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush said, but added that there was "no reason" the White House and Congress could not come together and draft the framework to stop sequestration.
While Congress continues to wrangle over a sequestration solution, the White House is reportedly near a decision on their pick to lead the Pentagon.
A formal announcement naming former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as the administration's pick to replace soon-to-be outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta could arrive as soon as next week.
Hagel, who currently serves as the president of the Atlantic Council, has undergone the White House's vetting process for the top job at the Department of Defense and is awaiting President Obama's final approval for the Pentagon nomination, Bloomberg reported last Thursday.
Hagel was brought to the White House on Dec. 4 to discuss the possibility of taking Panetta's post after the Pentagon chief announced earlier this year that he would likely be leaving the department.
Hagel, former DOD policy chief Michele Flournoy and current Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter were the top three finalists to be Panetta's successor at DOD. He was also rumored to be at the top on Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz) list of defense chiefs during his failed presidential bid in 2008.
