Full House

The House Appropriations Committee has marked up its version of the fiscal year 2015 defense spending bill and will report the legislation to the full House.

In the most significant acquisition news from today's hearing on the bill, the committee voted against a proposed amendment by Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), who sought to prevent the scheduled retirement of the Air Force's A-10 aircraft by transferring nearly $340 million from the service's operations and maintenance accounts to pay for it. The measure was defeated 13-23.

Lawmakers also noted their frustration that the Defense Department has yet to submit a final request for overseas contingency operations funds.

Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-IN) said the lack of an OCO budget put the appropriators in a "very difficult position." He also took the Obama administration to task for providing too few details on an announced $5 billion counterterrorism effort and $1 billion European Reassurance Initiative that would be funded through OCO. The congressman called the plan "muddled."

Defense budget analysts who spoke to Inside the Pentagon last week were also skeptical:

Most experts estimate that the supplemental budget, known as the overseas contingency operations (OCO) fund, will be somewhere between $50 billion and $70 billion when it is finally submitted this summer, though Congress is operating with a $79 billion place-holder.

However, Todd Harrison, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Inside the Pentagon that Obama's new $6 billion initiatives will surely complicate matters, especially if they become long-term priorities (as they appear to be) and not one-time costs.

"It does push the OCO budget higher than I was expecting," he told ITP in a June 4 email. "If these funding streams last for more than a couple of years, then they will need to migrate to the base budget. But that could be after this administration is gone."

The issue is especially complex since Congress must approve the new funds and it has become increasingly opposed to vague piles of money, Harrison explained.

"Congress will certainly have a say in this, and I fully expect it to make changes to what the president is requesting," he wrote. "But in the end, I think these two initiatives will make it into the budget in some form. Supplemental budget requests like the OCO budget don't come with multiyear projections. They are proposed and funded one year at a time, so all I expect to see is FY-15 funding for now. However, I do expect that these are intended to be ongoing initiatives that will show up in future OCO requests."