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House bill would fund DoD through September

The House Appropriations Committee introduced a seventh stopgap spending measure late Monday that would fund the Pentagon through September.

The temporary spending bill — known as a continuing resolution — would prevent a government shutdown for one more week, but would keep the Defense Department running through the fiscal year.

The new legislation provides $515.8 billion for the Defense Department's 2011 base budget, but does not include military construction.

This means the defense spending level is actually similar to H.R. 1, the appropriations bill the House passed in February.

While the president's budget request for 2011 included a $549 billion base budget for defense, including military construction, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Feb. 14 that the department could get by with $540 billion.

At the time, he warned of the consequences of operating under a yearlong CR, which would set base defense spending at $526 billion.

This new House legislation cuts even deeper than a CR would, but its passage would exempt the military from a government shutdown. It would also give the Pentagon the ability to plan for the rest of the year and make necessary spending choices, which have been delayed while Congress has struggled to pass a 2011 budget.

According to a news release from House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., the CR provides a total of $157.8 billion for overseas contingency operations. The bill contains $126 billion for military personnel, $166 billion for operations and maintenance, $102 billion for procurement, $75 billion for research and development, and $31 billion for Defense Department health programs.

The military’s personnel and procurement accounts take the biggest hit. In the Pentagon’s 2011 budget request, there was $139 billion budgeted for military personnel and $113 billion for procurement.

Related to defense, the CR cuts $832 million in the State Department and foreign operations portions of the budget.

For the most part, the defense bill does not include funding direction for specific programs. Rather, it provides funding lines for broad categories — for example, procuring Air Force aircraft.

It does include more detailed language for the Navy’s shipbuilding programs, providing a specific funding line for each item. There is lots of detailed language about what the bill funds; for example, Page 95 states that “none of the funds appropriated by this Act may be used to transfer research and development, acquisition, or other program authority relating to current tactical unmanned aerial vehicles from the Army.”