Pentagon Funds Cut $9 Billion by Senate Panel

The Senate Armed Services Committee voted Thursday to cut in half President Reagan’s request for a 5.9% after-inflation increase in the defense budget. And Chairman Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), anticipating efforts to cut defense spending further on the Senate floor, said: “We’ll be lucky to hold what we have.”

The committee voted 13 to 6 to recommend Senate passage of a $304-billion Pentagon budget, about $9 billion less than the total sought by Reagan but a 3% increase beyond the expected inflation rate in the coming fiscal year.

Energy Department spending for nuclear weapons would bring the government’s overall national defense budget to $312 billion in fiscal 1986, which begins Oct. 1.

Goldwater, when asked what advice he would give the White House on the cutbacks, replied: “I’d advise them to accept these figures and be very happy.

“While it doesn’t keep up with the President’s requested rate of growth, which I think it should have, we can live with this,” he said.

Democrats Split

The committee’s 10 Republicans were joined by three Democratic senators--Sam Nunn of Georgia, John C. Stennis of Mississippi and John Glenn of Ohio--in voting for the proposal. The other six Democrats on the committee opposed it. The six in the minority lost a vote to recommend raising the Pentagon’s budget only enough to cover cost increases caused by inflation, which is expected to be 4% to 5% in fiscal 1986.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), one of those who supported freezing spending at the level of inflation, said that “now we’ve hurt our chances for deficit reduction.”

The Republican-dominated Senate and the Democratic-led House have yet to act on defense spending, but the final authorization is not expected to be higher than the figure approved by the committee Thursday. Thus, Reagan is likely to receive the slimmest defense increase since he took office four years ago.

Once the Senate and House have acted on the defense budget, differences in their two versions will be worked out in negotiations.

Meanwhile, Senate Republican leaders and Reagan reached a compromise on a governmentwide budget plan under which the President would be granted half of the defense spending increase he wants--about the same increase approved by Goldwater’s committee.

Under the Armed Services Committee plan, the 48 MX missiles requested by Reagan would be cut to 21, which translates into a reduction of $981 million from his $4-billion request for the MX. The 21 would bring total MX production to 63, but the committee would provide funds for only 50 silos.

Reagan’s plans call for placing 100 MX missiles in existing Minuteman 3 silos near Cheyenne, Wyo. But Goldwater made it clear that he saw little chance of deploying more than 50 of the 10-warhead, 195,000-pound weapons that are the centerpiece of Reagan’s nuclear force modernization.

“I would think the MX is about as big as it’s going to get,” the committee chairman said at a news conference announcing the completion of the panel’s work on the budget.

‘Star Wars’ Cut

The committee decided also to:

--Cut funding for research on the “Star Wars” space-based missile defense system to $3.4 billion from a requested $3.7 billion. Spending this year on the project is about $1.4 billion.

--Provide full funding, $5.8 billion, for the B-1B bomber, made by Rockwell International. This would complete production of the 100 airplanes scheduled to take over some of the mission of the aging B-52 fleet.

--Grant Reagan’s request for funding for the Stealth bomber, intended to take advantage of new technology to elude enemy radar, and for the advanced cruise missile. The amount to be authorized is classified.

--Provide about $1.7 billion for one Trident submarine and additional funding for continued development of anti-satellite devices and 840 M-1 tanks. Also, the committee recommended meeting Reagan’s request of $624 million for work on a small, single-warhead Midgetman intercontinental ballistic missile, while requiring the Air Force to devote further study to the missile project.

--Cut $1.1 billion from the $10.2 billion military construction budget.

Overall, half of the $9 billion that the committee would pare from Reagan’s request would come from weapons procurement.

The committee, which struggled for nearly a day with a Republican proposal to trim the Pentagon’s 3.1-million-person military and civilian payroll by 175,000, ended up voting to give Reagan an increase of 14,900 military personnel, approximately 60% of the growth he had sought.

But the Defense Department’s 1-million-person civilian payroll would be frozen under the committee blueprint.

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, under pressure from Congress to deliver suggestions to save money, had offered a list of 22 military bases that could be closed.

The committee asked the secretary to resubmit that list, assessing the costs and savings tied to the closings and to include other bases he considers targets for termination. The panel refused to fund new construction at the 22 sites on Weinberger’s list.

Prevailing Wage Issue

Returning to a proposal that was defeated in the Senate two years ago, the committee recommended that a federal law requiring the payment of prevailing local wages for federal construction projects not be applied to military projects.

The committee approved also a plan to impose stricter limits on Defense Department civilians’ and military personnel’s seeking of jobs with defense contractors they are expected to monitor.