Budget/Appropriations

The bill includes plans for an East Coast missile defense site and a ban on same-sex marriage ceremonies on bases.

House conservatives will be holding their noses as they vote for legislation to replace defense cuts.

The Republican alternative would halt next year’s automatic, across-the-board spending cuts by replacing defense cuts with cuts to social programs.

Lawmakers say they have serious questions about whether the nation can afford the new intelligence agency being proposed by the Pentagon.

Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers and Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess unveiled their budget plan for the new Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) during a closed-door hearing Tuesday of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

The new office is designed to work with its counterparts at the CIA and across the U.S. intelligence community to gather information on national-security threats beyond the battlefield, according to defense officials. 

The department claims the new agency can be fully funded within the five-year budget plan for the Pentagon that Congress is already reviewing.

But lawmakers who attended Tuesday’s session seemed skeptical about the costs of the venture. 

The House Appropriations Defense subcommittee approved the defense spending bill on a voice vote Tuesday, moving forward the $608 billion legislation.

The bill was quickly approved in a closed-door session Tuesday morning, which is a near opposite to Wednesday’s markup of the defense authorization bill in the House Armed Services Committee, where a marathon session is expected with hordes of amendments.

The House Budget Committee late Monday approved a bill turning off most of the $109 billion across-the-board automatic spending cut slated to take place Jan. 2, by a 21 to 13 vote.

The bill removes $78 billion in discretionary cuts that had been triggered by the failure of last year's debt supercommittee. To make up the rest, it lowers the appropriations spending cap for next year by $19 billion and keeps in place about $12 billion in automatic cuts to mandatory spending, including Medicare spending.

Earlier in the day, the Budget committee had reported out a bill by a vote of 21 to 9 that would cut spending by $261 billion over ten years. That bill, offered as a replacement to the automatic spending sequester, was called for in the House-passed budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Read more...

House appropriators on Monday announced that they had come up with a 2013 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill that both Republicans and Democrats can live with.

But because of a wider fight between President Obama and the House GOP over top-line budget levels, the bill, which faces a Tuesday subcommittee markup, has no chance of becoming law.

The House Appropriations Defense subcommittee has allocated $519.2B in base defense spending and maintains programs DOD hopes to cut.

The House gets its turn to mold the defense budget this week as the Pentagon’s 2013 spending plan gets marked up in committee.

The main event is Wednesday’s marathon markup in the House Armed Services Committee, where Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) will lead the 62-member panel as it slices and dices the Pentagon’s $500 billion-plus budget.

The markup of the defense authorization bill routinely lasts well past midnight. While there have been some whisperings that the markup this year has some chance of finishing by the early hour of 10 p.m., most have quickly quashed those rumors as wishful thinking.

Australia's decision to push back planned purchases of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is only the latest crack in the increasingly fragile JSF international coalition. 

Read more...