Fox: DoD Gambles On Sequester

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/02/fox-dod-gambles-on-sequester/

Fox: DoD Gambles On Sequester
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. and Colin Clark
on February 25, 2014 at 5:49 PM

NEWSEUM: At first it looks like pure wishful thinking: The administration’s 2015 budget plan assumes the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration don’t go back into effect in 2016, when the stay of execution known as the Balanced Budget Act runs out. In fact, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official argued today, the administration is taking a calculated gamble, eyes wide open.

“We know sequester’s the law in ’16 . We’re not blind to that fact, and we’ve planned for it,” said Christine Fox, the acting Deputy Secretary of Defense, at the McAleese Associates/Credit Suisse conference here today. But “the president and the secretary of Defense can’t submit a budget that does not support the needs of our strategy and the needs of this nation’s security. We just couldn’t do it.”

“The most important thing that we need to do is get rid of this prospect of going back to sequestration in FY ’16,” Fox said. Even if Congress rejects the $26 billion Opportunity, Growth and Security Fund the administration has asked for to get around the budget limits, which she knows will be “a controversial thing,” Fox said, “we can hold our nose and live through ’15.”

That’s not to say she’s thrilled with the funding level set by last December’s Balanced Budget Act, which slowed the sequestration cuts for 2014 and 2015. “Given where we were at the time, where we’d been through a government shutdown and a year of sequester, stability was a gift and we jumped on that gift,” Fox said. “But when you look at the amount of money the BBA gave to the Department of Defense [for 2015, it's], frankly just about $7 billion above sequester…. We all wanted the stability but the amount is frankly just not adequate.”