Military Draws List of Possible Spending Cuts

The military services, faced with a congressional mandate to cut $5.85 billion from the current Pentagon budget, are drawing up lists of potential programs to trim. And, although no decision has been made on whether to reduce payments to military personnel, officials are leaning against such cuts, according to a Pentagon source.

Defense Department officials are in the midst of a double-barreled budget exercise, completing work on the 1987 military spending request that President Reagan will send to Congress next month while searching for ways to reach the lowered spending ceiling imposed on the current 1986 budget by the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction legislation.

Gramm-Rudman Constraints

Deputy Defense Secretary William H. Taft IV, the Pentagon comptroller, and budget analysts “are looking ahead to what must be done to meet the requirements of Gramm-Rudman,” the Pentagon source said.

That plan will bring about cuts in defense budget authority totaling about $80 billion this fiscal year and next, Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, contends. Recommendations for the 1986 cuts must be made by Feb. 1, to take effect March 1.

“This isn’t just tinkering at the edges of the defense budget. It means we are reversing the defense buildup of the last few years,” Aspin said in a statement released Sunday.

The deficit reduction plan, named after its chief sponsors, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N. H.), gives the Pentagon a certain amount of flexibility as it searches for areas to cut in the current fiscal year. Thus, in reaching the target of $5.85 billion--out of overall Pentagon outlays of $281.2 billion--Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger can seek the entire reduction without touching the accounts that pay the nation’s 2.1 million members of the armed services.

Although no decision has been made on whether the personnel fund will be cut, “the expectation is it will be protected,” a senior Pentagon official said.

3% Hike in 1987

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials are expecting Reagan to seek military spending authority of $314.7 billion in the budget he submits for fiscal 1987, which will begin Oct. 1. This is a 3% increase from the budget figure set before the deficit reduction plan was approved--an increase to which Reagan and congressional leaders had agreed before deficit-cutting fever overcame the House and Senate last month.

Pentagon budget authority usually is a greater figure than annual budget outlays, because budget authority represents permission to spend an amount that may actually be disbursed over a period of years.

In a written analysis of the impact of the deficit reduction plan, Aspin said that, although Reagan has set targets of 3% growth in defense spending in 1987 and 1988, “he will miss it by a mile.”

Aspin said that, in addition to trimming budget authority $15 billion this year to achieve a spending cut of $5.85 billion, the deficit reduction legislation will result by 1987 in “cutting defense (budget authority) $65 billion or a whopping 20% below the target” set for the year in earlier projections.

“We will have suffered two consecutive years of decline and, relative to fiscal year 1985, the last year we had a real increase in defense appropriations, we will have suffered a real cut of 18%,” he said.

But Aspin’s predictions were challenged as “a bit too Draconian,” by Gordon Adams, director of the Defense Budget Project, a privately funded organization that studies Pentagon spending issues.

He said that Pentagon outlays could be expected to fall by about $10 billion in 1987 after taking into account expected inflation of about 4%.