McCain proposes $640B defense budget for 2018 | TheHill: Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) is proposing a $640 billion base defense budget for the next fiscal year, $54 billion above what had been projected by the Obama administration.
“President-elect Donald Trump
has pledged to ‘fully eliminate the defense sequester’ and ‘submit a new budget to rebuild our military.’ This cannot happen soon enough,” McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, wrote in a 33-page white paper released over the holiday weekend.
“The damage that has been done to our military over the past eight years will not be reversed in one year. Just stemming the bleeding caused by recent budget cuts will take most of the next five years, to say nothing of the sustained increases in funding required thereafter.”
McCain’s plan would pay for more troops for the Army and Marine Corps, more ships for the Navy and more planes for the Air Force. But it would require caps on defense spending to be overturned, an action that has eluded Congress since such caps were enacted in 2011 and that fiscal conservatives are expected to continue pushing against.
Combined with a projected $60 billion for a war fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, McCain’s plan would bring next year’s defense budget to a total of $700 billion.
