(Bloomberg News) Republicans and President Barack Obama are squaring off again over federal spending, only this time the president wants to cut it and the Republicans want to increase it.
As a Senate committee begins work today on a bill authorizing next year's military budget, White House officials have threatened a veto of anything resembling a measure passed by the House last week that would add $4 billion to his request for the Pentagon.
With the war in Iraq over, the military involvement in Afghanistan winding down and federal spending squeezed by mounting debt, Obama has proposed reducing the defense budget by 4.9 percent from this year's level. Though the Joint Chiefs of Staff backed the plan, House Republicans challenged their advice. Howard "Buck" McKeon of California, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, warned against letting the U.S. become a "paper tiger."
The fight has already spilled over into election-year politics. Republicans have usually depicted Democratic presidents as weak on defense, and Obama's challenger, Mitt Romney, called the president "reckless" for signing a law last year that could mean as much as $1 trillion less for the Pentagon over a decade if Congress fails to agree on a plan to reduce deficits and the debt.
Democrats say it is wrong to spend more on defense while cutting domestic programs. The House "puts the funding of an already bloated military budget ahead of any semblance of fiscal responsibility," said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon before voting against the $554 billion bill.
Senate Democrats
Democrats, who control the Senate panel taking up the defense authorization measure, are likely to abide by Obama's spending limits, or even go "perhaps lower than the president's request," said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
In fact, Obama's longer-term plan calls for a modest increase after the cut he is seeking for next year. In contrast to prior post-war periods, when the Pentagon was hit with major reductions -- 40 percent in the six years after Korea and 28 percent in the decade after Vietnam -- Obama's five-year plan calls for it to start getting a gradual 1.9 percent increase each year through 2017, without adjusting for inflation.
With or without the additional money passed by the House, U.S. military spending far outweighs that of any potential adversary.
Biggest Spender
U.S. spending accounted for 41 percent of global military expenditures in 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. China accounted for 8.2 percent and Russia 4.1 percent, the Stockholm-based policy group said in an April report.
Historically, the argument over defense versus domestic spending has been settled with more money for each, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
"This goes back a long way to the 1980s when Republicans controlled the Senate and got what they wanted on defense, and Democrats in the House got most of what they wanted on social spending," Sabato said in an interview. "That's the reason we started down this path toward giant national debt."