Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel met quietly with congressional leaders of three defense committees on Thursday as lawmakers prepare the Pentagon’s budget for next year.
Hagel spoke with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the incoming leaders of the Armed Services committees, and Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), who was reappointed as chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Defense.
{mosads}The chair of the Senate’s Appropriations subcommittee on Defense has yet to be announced.
“He wanted to reach out to these leaders to discuss a wide range of issues of importance to the Defense Department, to include our budget pressures,” said Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby.
Lawmakers are putting together an omnibus 2015 spending bill, which would fund the Defense Department through next September. However, before recessing on Dec. 12, they could instead simply extend a temporary funding measure known as a continuing resolution (CR).
A news report said Hagel was on Capitol Hill to argue against a CR, which would hold the Pentagon to 2014 funding levels and restrict spending on new programs and projects. Frelinghuysen is the current chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Defense, and would be involved in any such process.
Hagel spoke out against a CR on Wednesday during a PBS interview.
“You can’t run any institution by the uncertainty of maybe you’ll get funding in six months, maybe you won’t, maybe it will be the same, maybe it won’t,” he said. “Especially you can’t run national security … on the basis of hope of a continuing resolution.”
He also urged lawmakers to overturn Defense budget caps under sequestration.
“We won’t have the resources. We won’t have the readiness. We won’t have the capability. We won’t have the long-term investments that this institution requires to stay ahead of everybody else as we have since World War II with a technological edge, with the ability to continue to recruit, retain the best people,” Hagel said.
The Defense Department will submit its 2016 defense budget request to Congress in March, which Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey suggested Wednesday would be higher than caps.
McCain and Thornberry would oversee the process of authorizing that budget, and Frelinghuysen would oversee House Appropriations of that budget.
Lawmakers partially lifted caps for 2014 and 2015, and experts say they are likely to do so again in 2016 and 2017.
“We the Defense Department are being called upon to do more everywhere,” Hagel said. “And our budget continues to be cut. Something doesn’t connect here and that’s going to have to change.”