Pentagon Cuts: Good News, But More to Do

By Jim Cason on 10/25/2011 @ 10:30 AM

Tags: War Is Not the Answer, budget

First the good news: Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the House Armed Services Committee this month that the Pentagon could cut as much as $450 billion out of its projected budget for the next 10 years. I can't remember a time in recent history when a Pentagon chief has acknowledge that his budget could be cut by hundreds of billions of dollars.

That the Pentagon is acknowledging such cuts would be "manageable" is further evidence of the tough fiscal pressures our country now faces and growing public concern about out-of-control war spending. Of course, as Sen. Tom Carper (DE) has documented, cuts of this magnitude would be possible just by eliminating cost overruns in major weapons systems.

The bad news is that, even with a $450 billion cut, the Pentagon is just cutting from the budgeted growth in spending over the next ten years, as my colleague Ruth Flower has demonstrated. Congress would need to cut at least $1 trillion in Pentagon spending -- not including spending on the wars -- in order to reduce spending from current levels.

Don't stop at $450 billion

The challenge now is that Secretary Panetta, the president and many members of Congress are arguing that $450 billion in cuts might be possible, but not a penny more should be cut. Meanwhile, military contractors are warning of dire consequences to the safety of the nation, to jobs and to national defense if even these cuts take place. Whether these arguments succeed or not depends on how effective we are at lobbying.

The Pentagon contractors have good reason to worry. According to the Project on Government Oversight, since 2003 more than half of all spending on U.S. national security has gone to Department of Defense contractors. As POGO points out, spending on weapons systems has long been dominated by contractors, but now contractors also receive a majority of all dollars spent on personnel.

When critics in your community argue that Pentagon spending can't be cut because of the need to protect individual soldiers, I would encourage you to respond that protecting the soldiers is fine, but protecting runaway spending on contractors is not. It might also be a good idea to ask the soldiers. I know several former soldiers who say that the best way to protect the troops is to develop an alternative U.S. foreign policy that was more focused on cooperation rather than confrontation and preventing wars rather than fighting them.

How do we do this?

The first step is to continue to focus on efforts to persuade every member of Congress to lobby the supercommittee to cut Pentagon spending by at least $1 trillion dollars in the next ten years. Our lobbyists are hearing that letters to the editor and visits to the district offices of members of Congress are particularly effective. But we also know that we are going to have to keep up this lobbying throughout the next year.

The latest argument we are hearing here in Washington is that cuts in Pentagon spending will force cuts in jobs in local communities around the country. I don't doubt that, just as the dramatic cuts in federal transfers to local governments has caused layoffs of tens of thousands of state and local workers, cuts in Pentagon spending could cause some layoffs. But as John Feffer and Miriam Pemberton have pointed out, several studies have shown that investing in the military to produce jobs is much less efficient than investing in other sectors.

I would also encourage you to think about how to start a conversation with someone who you might think would not normally want to lobby to cut Pentagon spending. Here are a couple of ideas:

• One way to start a conversation is to talk about waste, fraud and abuse in Pentagon spending. My colleague Ruth Flower is fond of saying that the Pentagon wastes more in any given year than many cabinet agencies have to spend. In a letter to Secretary Panetta last month, Sen. Tom Carper highlighted $402 billion in cost overruns in Pentagon weapons systems. That total is up from $42 billion in 2000 and $295 billion in 2007. I doubt many local businesses in your community could tolerate that level of cost overrun.
• Ask friends and neighbors about budget cuts in your local community or state. Right now, about one-fifth of all government spending goes to state and local communities. But in almost every scenario federal transfers to the states are likely to face drastic cuts in the next 10 years. The cuts will be a lot more severe if Pentagon spending isn't cut back substantially.

Here at FCNL we don't have all the answers. But what we keep hearing from members of Congress and their staff is that your lobbying, your letters to the editor and your letters to Congress are making a difference. Lockheed and the military contractors may have a lot of money, but you have something more important -- you are all constituents of members of Congress. So use your voice, make yourself heard and keep working with us to seize the best opportunity we have had in decades to cut Pentagon spending.