Lawmaker: DoD budget to hold at $513 billion - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Lawmaker: DoD budget to hold at $513 billion

The ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee predicted Wednesday that there is little wiggle room in the overall size of the $513 billion budget for 2013 that the Defense Department is expected to unveil on Thursday.

The topline will not go up, said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, because that is the spending level approved last year by Congress as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. That means any changes lawmakers want to make will require offsetting cuts elsewhere in the military budget.

“Regardless of who voted for it or against it, it is the law of the land,” Smith said in an interview. “I just said regardless, but it does matter because it was this Republican Congress that passed the Budget Control Act that put these numbers in place. Whatever rhetoric comes out of the armed services committee, Republican or Democrat, the House is going to pass a budget with these numbers. There is not going to be any debate in the armed services committee about what the numbers will be.”

The topline also won’t go down, Smith said. Although there is much hand-wringing and political rhetoric over the dire consequences to the military of a possible $1.2 trillion across-the-board reduction in federal spending, Smith predicted those cuts, which could include $500 billion in defense spending reductions over 10 years, won’t happen.

“Sequestration is not going to happen,” he said, outlining several scenarios where the automatic cuts — a result of last year’s failure to reach a bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction — could be avoided or rescinded.

However, he cautioned that the threat of sequestration could hang over the government until after the November elections, and might not be fully resolved until January 2013 — about the time the budget cuts are due to take effect.