Trump's Raid on Pentagon Funds Could Spark Another Shutdown Fight

Plus, does Trump have a policy agenda?

Trump’s Raid on Pentagon Funds Could Spark Another Shutdown Showdown

The Pentagon’s announcement that it will shift $3.6 billion from military construction projects to fund the repair and construction of barriers on the border with Mexico is meeting bipartisan resistance in Washington, and the controversy could complicate efforts to pass appropriations bills — and keep the government open — this fall.

In the wake of the announcement, Democrats vowed to oppose the administration’s move and accused President Trump of playing politics with national security. “The well-being of American troops is the core responsibility of every commander in the military, yet the Commander-in-Chief is shirking that duty so he can advance his own political agenda,” said Democratic Senator Tim Kaine.

Criticizing Trump’s use of a national emergency declaration to enable the transfer of Pentagon funds to the border, Republican Senator Mike Lee said, "Congress has been ceding far too much powers to the executive branch for decades and it is far past time for Congress to restore the proper balance of power between the three branches.”

More details on the deferred projects: The Pentagon released a list late Wednesday of 127 projects that are being delayed due to the diversion of funds to the border (see the full list at PBS). Domestically, the diversion of funds affects 43 projects in 23 states, as well as 21 projects in three U.S. territories, together worth roughly $1.8 billion. The rest of the money is being drawn from 64 projects in 19 countries around the world (plus one “classified” location and one that is “unspecified.”)

Here are some highlights from the list:

  • Puerto Rico is the biggest single loser, with projects worth about $400 million being deferred, says James Hohmann of The Washington Post. Most of the construction projects are related to recovery efforts from Hurricane Maria.

     
  • The European Deterrence Initiative, created to counter Russia’s aggression in Crimea, will lose $770 million designated for projects in Estonia, Poland, Italy, Slovakia and Hungary.

     
  • Projects in Utah will lose $54 million — raising questions about the motivations behind some of the cuts. “This is striking because both of the state’s conservative senators, Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, voted against Trump’s border emergency in March and supported the resolution of disapproval,” Hohmann writes. “Is it retaliation?” Politico notes that of “the $1.08 billion in cuts coming from military facilities inside 23 U.S. states, 55 percent came from states Hillary Clinton won, versus 45 percent from states won by Trump.”

     
  • The U.S. Military Academy at West Point — located in the home state of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a frequent critic of the president — will lose $160 million, including $95 million designated for an engineering center.

     
  • The list includes “child care centers, roads, at least one cybersecurity facility,” says Roll Call’s John M. Donnelly. Reuters’ Bryan Pietsch cites “maintenance shops, equipment storage buildings and hazardous material warehouses” as well.

Budget conflict ahead? Democratic lawmakers face a tricky situation as they plan their response to Trump’s move, The Hill’s Niv Elis and Cristina Marcos say. While they have vowed not to backfill the funding for the projects that are losing money, they don’t want to be blamed by Trump for failing to provide money for important military construction projects.

The issue could get caught up in the budgetary battles that are set to resume next week when lawmakers return to Washington from summer recess. Congress needs to reauthorize the annual National Defense Authorization Act before the end of the year, but the current versions of the legislation in the House and Senate take starkly different approaches when it comes to the border. The Senate version backfills all of the $3.6 billion in Pentagon construction funds that are being diverted, while the House version specifically denies the administration the right to use Pentagon funds to build a border wall.

More immediately, lawmakers are expected to take up a short-term funding bill in the next few weeks, before the fiscal year ends on September 30. “That deadline could also become a flashpoint,” Elis and Marcos say, with another government shutdown looming as a possibility if the disagreement over border wall funding cannot be resolved. “A showdown over the wall in December prevented a similar stopgap measure from going through, resulting in a record 35-day partial government shutdown,” they note.

Does Trump Have an Agenda for 2020?

In a tweet earlier this week, President Trump urged the Democratic-controlled House to move past what he calls “witch hunt” investigations and “get back to work on drug prices, healthcare, infrastructure and all else.” Yet as The New York Times’s Michael Crowley writes, with more than 400 days to go before the 2020 election, Trump heads into this fall “without a clear policy agenda and with an uphill path to achieving any major new accomplishments before he faces voters.”

In the policy areas Trump highlighted, hope for progress has often been thwarted by Trump himself, or by his administration.

On infrastructure, Trump abruptly canceled a May meeting with Democratic leaders, angered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suggestion to reporters that he was engaged in a “cover-up.”

On health care, the administration-supported legal case to strike down the Affordable Care Act is still making its way through the courts, but Trump has yet to release his own Obamacare replacement plan. Much of his administration’s agenda on drug pricing has been scrapped or is still in the process of being implemented. And new rules requiring increased price transparency for drug ads and hospitals still face legal challenges as well.

Congress is likely to try to address both drug prices and surprise medical bills this fall, and could still deliver Trump health care wins he can tout on the campaign trail. But a bipartisan push to protect against surprise medical bills is already “facing a buzzsaw of opposition from doctors and hospitals,” The Hill reports — adding that “some leading Democrats have objected to moving on the issue now, wary of giving Trump and Republicans a win on health care.”

Ultimately, as Axios’s Caitlin Owens suggests, if Trump doesn’t win a second term, “his health care legacy would be pretty modest.”

On taxes, Trump and others in his administration have discussed the possibility of additional tax cuts, but there’s no realistic chance that Congress would approve anything before the election and any action Trump tries to take unilaterally — for example, by indexing capital gains to inflation — would likely be met with legal challenges.

What Trump wants: Trump may still have some opportunities to rack up policy achievements ahead of the election, especially on prescription drug prices. But the chances are likely to dwindle quickly as we get closer to November 2020 — and, as Crowley writes, a crucial factor in whether anything substantial gets done “is a president whose fleeting attention span, impatience with policy details and appetite for personal feuds and news media controversies make for a limited interest in traditional legislating and regulating.” The big question is still whether the president will push for any specific policy agenda or just focus on campaigning.

The bottom line: At least in terms of presidential election politics, scoring some policy victories may be of limited importance at this point. “His supporters care far more about the persona than the policy,” Brendan Buck, who served as a spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, told the Times. Ultimately, Buck noted, the president “controls what we talk about, and he’s made clear he doesn’t need a policy win to control the conversation, for better or worse.”

Chart of the Day

From a new Brookings Institution blog post, “Estimating the economic impact of a wealth tax,” which summarizes a new paper by University of California-Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman:

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