FY2013 Defense Budget Request: Overview and Context. Updated April 20, 2012.

摘要

This report analyzes President Obama's FY2013 defense budget request and the long-term deficit reduction issues relevant to congressional discussion of that request. Congressional action on the FY2013 defense budget will be analyzed in a separate report. The FY2013 Department of Defense (DOD) budget request includes a total of $613.9 billion in discretionary budget authority: $525.4 billion for the so-called base budget (excluding operations in Afghanistan and Iraq), and $88.5 billion for war costs or Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). Overall, that request is $31.8 billion less than was appropriated for DOD in FY2012, with most of the reduction accounted for by the continuing drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (See Table 1 and Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) ). Apart from declining war costs, the base budget request is $5.2 billion below the corresponding FY2012 appropriation, and it would mark the first decrease in Pentagon spending (excluding war costs) since FY1998. Moreover, the request is $45.3 billion lower than the amount the Administration had projected a year earlier that it would request for the FY2013 base budget (see Figure 1). That reduction reflects caps on discretionary spending that were established by the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011, enacted in August 2011. All told, funding caps established by the BCA are intended to reduce projected federal spending by more than $900 billion over the 10 years from FY2012-FY2021.