The U.S. Capitol seen through a window of the Cannon House Office Building. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)
WASHINGTON — The House on Tuesday narrowly adopted a budget blueprint that would invest an additional $100 billion in defense in the next decade as part of a sweeping Republican plan to enact President Donald Trump’s economic agenda.
Republicans pushed through the resolution with a 217-215 party-line vote, approving a plan that would raise spending for the military and security at the U.S.-Mexico border while slashing federal spending elsewhere and extending $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
The framework for the House budget is part of a Republican effort to use a process called reconciliation to circumvent Democratic opposition and pass a massive financial package without needing 60 votes in the Senate.
The Senate last week passed its own version of the budget resolution, which calls for a $150 billion increase in military spending and saves the tax cuts for later legislation. Trump has said he prefers “one big beautiful bill” as the House has approved.
Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday that a $100 billion increase in defense spending will help fund the Pentagon’s southern border operations “because border security is national security.”
The funds also would be used to improve the quality of life for service members, revitalize the defense industrial base, restock critical munitions, expand shipbuilding capacity and enhance missile defense, he said.
“The $100 billion in defense spending this resolution unlocks will enable us to begin restoring American deterrence, prioritizing lethality and ensuring peace through strength,” Rogers said.
The blueprint will ultimately allow the U.S. to get defense spending back above 4% of gross domestic product, he said, fulfilling a goal often touted by defense hawks. The current $850 billion Pentagon budget represents about 3% of GDP.
The budget resolution directs the House Armed Services Committee to detail how the additional funds would be spent in the next 10 years, but no plan can move forward until the House and Senate agree on one budget blueprint.
The budget proposals from both chambers contain extra military spending as well as instructions to boost funding for the Coast Guard. Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., on Tuesday called the Coast Guard “the workhorse when it comes to securing our maritime border.”
“I’m grateful for the president’s focus on providing robust resources to the services to do even more, and I know that the men and women in the Coast Guard are very up to the task,” he said.
Graves added Republicans have been “hard at work to make sure that we are prepared to support the Coast Guard while also being good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars by responsibly offsetting our investments.”
The House budget resolution would add about $3 trillion to the deficit in a decade while mandating deep cuts that threaten to significantly shrink Medicaid and food programs for low-income people. It also calls for the debt limit to be raised by $4 trillion.
Democrats decried the blueprint as a “betrayal of the middle class.”
Rep. Mark Takano of California, the top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said the plan would harm 9 million veterans that rely on Medicaid for health insurance coverage and more than 1 million veterans who use the SNAP food assistance program, formerly known as food stamps.
He said the Republican budget blueprint would also “take a chainsaw” to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The resolution does not specify exact cuts, but it mandates committees find $2 trillion in total spending reductions to finance tax cuts or reduce the amount of the tax cuts.
“This is completely unacceptable,” Takano said of the resolution in a floor speech before the vote. “I urge every member to oppose this abomination of a resolution that uses veterans as a piggy bank to pay for a billionaire tax break.”
