See no sequester, hear no sequester, speak no sequester

We are about to step through the defense budget looking glass. This week, Congress is picking up the public process of deciding, or appearing to decide, how much money the Department of Defense will have in the fiscal year starting October 1. And not only are they ignoring the sequester (like the administration did in its budget request), they are actually using every trick in the book to make it go away, as far as defense is concerned.

The Senate and House budget committees have already taken the first step, coming up with overall budget bills that differ from each other — Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan protected DOD while savaging domestic programs; Chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray wrote a bill that pretty much looked like the president’s budget request, cutting DOD a bit while preserving domestic programs.

Neither budget resolution dealt with the statutory reality: In the absence of a big budget deal (no sign of that; not even a peep), the funding level for defense in Fiscal Year 2014 will be about $52 billion below what the president asked for. And the two resolutions are so far apart and a budget agreement so unlikely that neither committee or its leaders seem anxious to write a joint resolution with the other chamber.

This air of unreality will continue this week, as the House Appropriations Committee starts its march toward appropriations bills for the government, first with the markup of the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill. There is no sign the House appropriators are going to deal with the impact of sequestration in their bills.

And stalwart defender of defense, Chairman Buck McKeon of the House Armed Services Committee has just released the language of its authorizing bill for defense next year. It ignores the sequester levels entirely.

In fact, the McKeon bill is the most interesting maneuver, because it seeks to add funds to DOD to avoid the impact of sequestration even before the FY 2014 sequester hits. He uses a device I already pointed to in talking about the administration’s recent $ 80 billion request for funds for the war (Overseas Contingency Operations request): He adds money to the administration’s request in precisely those areas that sequestration cuts.

A brief background: The sequester at DOD affects primarily the operational accounts (pay and benefits are basically off the table; contractors with funded contracts face no reduction in the funding for those contracts).

The operational accounts (civilian pay, training, depot maintenance, fuel purchases, base operations, flying planes, driving tanks, sailing ships) are hit the hardest, but also have the highest degree of flexibility under the sequester rules; DOD can pretty much move money at will around the various activities to protect the most important.

One critical loophole for avoiding a defense sequester is the war operations accounts, which are exactly the same as the non-war operations; there is no distinction in Pentagon bookkeeping. Congress likes to fund the war budget, so, for 10 years, administrations have been tempted to put things in the war budget that are not really war spending, but stuff they could not get into the "base," or non-war budget.

The administration already did that in its most recent budget submission, as a way to mitigate the sequester. Pentagon sources tell me, on the QT, that as much as 20 percent of that $80 billion request for the war is really money for operations being squeezed by declining defense budgets and the sequester. It’s a "get well" escape hatch from sequester-land.

Buck McKeon seems to be trying to do more of the same. His bill not only funds the war budget fully, it adds more than $4 billion to those critical operational accounts, a 6.7 percent increase. And what is this extra lolly for? Precisely those things that sequester hits: depot maintenance , fuel purchases, "combat forces equipment" (unexplained), and "combat forces shortfall."

So the bills coming up, starting this week, will "see no sequester, hear no sequester, speak no sequester." But just in case, they will try to make up for it, as well.