Call for Revenue

The House Armed Services Committee's top Democrat is calling for the debt reduction supercommittee to include “significant revenue increases” in its plans to find nearly $1.5 trillion in savings.

In an Oct. 12 letter sent to the 12-member panel, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) states that further reductions to the Defense Department could undermine national security. Instead, the committee should propose legislation that “embraces revenue increases and that avoids precipitous cuts to programs essential to growth -- the engine of our national security," he writes.

“I ask the Joint Select Committee to refrain from making any deficit reduction recommendations that might prematurely force the DOD to make what may prove to be precarious strategic adjustments as a result of additional budgetary constraints,” Smith writes in his letter, which supplements the House authorization committee's recommendations on where to find spending cuts.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 required all committees to submit recommendations by Friday. The House Armed Services Committee plans to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. today to discuss its recommendations. Committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) has gone on record, along with his colleagues, to state that DOD's budget should not be cut further. During a speech last month, McKeon said that, if forced to choose, he would vote to raise taxes rather than further cut DOD's budget.

The supercommittee must finalize its bill before Thanksgiving. If it fails to find $1.2 billion in savings, it triggers a sequestration measure to find those savings -- half of which must come from DOD's coffers.