Biden’s Budget Proposal Gives Meager Boosts to Defense and Diplomacy

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep. For those of you who missed the Oscars over the weekend, you also missed a commercial during the movie awards promoting AUKUS. (Here’s hoping French officials didn’t tune in.)

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: What Biden’s $7.3 trillion budget plan says about the administration’s defense priorities, Russia puts nuclear weapons closer to NATO soil, and the U.S. Congress puts TikTok on the clock to boot its Chinese owners.

The Biden Budget Battle

U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled a massive $7.3 trillion federal budget plan that includes only marginal increases for defense, diplomacy, and foreign aid as the administration feels pressure from foreign-policy hawks on one side and budget hawks on the other.

Under Biden’s proposal, the U.S. defense budget would go up by 1 percent. U.S. troops would get a 4.5 percent pay raise. The Pentagon wants to field 10 long-range hypersonic weapons. It’s hoping to harden ballistic missile defenses around the island of Guam, home to a U.S. base that would almost certainly be a major Chinese target if the superpowers were to ever go head-to-head. And it wants to buy more stealthy B-21 bombers that should be ready to fly in a few years.

Like most budget proposals when the opposition controls at least one chamber of Congress, this is probably dead on arrival as critics hammer Biden for not being ambitious enough in defense and diplomacy funding (though he is operating under constraints set by Republican-negotiated budget caps). But the proposal still offers important insights into how the administration is trying to balance domestic and foreign-policy priorities for the near future.

The soft-power side of the budget. Biden’s budget allocates $64.4 billion for foreign affairs programs, of which $58.8 billion would go to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development.

This includes around $4 billion to be spent over five years on programs to counter China’s geopolitical clout and economic influence worldwide, including infrastructure development projects to counter Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The proposal falls short of Biden’s fiscal year 2023 plan that sought just over $70 billion for diplomacy and development, and foreign affairs experts have warned the 2025 figure is not enough money to deal with all the proliferating crises around the world.

GOP criticisms. Back on the defense side, top Republicans say that a 1 percent increase in defense isn’t an increase at all, as it doesn’t keep pace with the inflation rate, which is over 3 percent.

(We’ll note that none of the Republican lawmakers criticizing the defense budget, as far as we can track, mentioned the budget caps that Republicans themselves pushed the administration to adhere to last year.)

The Army and Navy, for instance, which are both struggling to recruit new soldiers and sailors, are aiming to downsize their active-duty forces in the new budget.

“This budget projects weakness to every corner of the globe,” Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement after the budget rollout. “The national defense budget that our country needs is one with real, sustained growth, not quiet decline.”

Wicker said the Biden budget does little to keep up with China’s estimated 7.2 percent increase in defense spending (although the numbers vary depending on who you talk to), and he knocked the U.S. administration for not giving enough money for operations in the Indo-Pacific, failing to scale up munitions production, and slowing development of missile defenses.

Hands are tied. The Biden administration has defended the budget request as the best it can do after Congress tied its purse strings with new spending caps—and lawmakers’ inability to pass last year’s budget.

“The department has no way around that reality. Instead, we have been strapped with a series of continuing resolutions,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said during a press briefing at the Pentagon on Monday. “Because of these statutory caps, and as good stewards of taxpayer dollars, we made smart, responsible choices to work within those limits.”

“We must continue to adapt, advance and innovate at speed and at scale across all domains, prioritizing China as the pacing challenge and Russia as an acute threat,” added Adm. Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the same briefing. “Our strategy-driven budget does exactly that.”

Family affair. And even within his party, Biden is getting heat from Navy proponents in Congress who want to see a Navy of 355 ships or more. (The U.S. Navy currently has 292 ships in the fleet.)

They are pushing the White House to double down on building up the submarine industrial base to replace the Virginia-class submarines that are heading to Australia as part of the AUKUS alliance with the United Kingdom and to get Columbia-class submarines rolling off of the production lines. The budget cuts submarine production by one—which critics say has been partially paid for and built.

“At a time when the pace of all of Navy shipbuilding—manned and unmanned, including carriers, submarines, destroyers, and frigates—is recovering from the impact of the COVID pandemic and supply chain disruptions, the Navy’s plan to cut a submarine that is already been partially paid for and built, makes little or no sense,” Rep. Joe Courtney, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee’s sea power panel, said in a statement. “If such a cut is actually enacted, it will remove one more attack submarine from a fleet that is already 17 submarines below the Navy’s long-stated requirement of 66.”

Expect sea power—and nuclear weapons—to be two of the main areas of budgetary haggling in the coming months.

Supplemental madness. Outside the budget, there is a lot riding on the Biden administration’s $106 billion national security supplemental, which includes U.S. military aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel as well as significant investments in the American defense industrial base, including to establish new factories for producing 155 mm artillery ammunition and to build more air defense interceptors that Kyiv has been burning through to fend off Russian air attacks.

The U.S. Army has indicated that without the supplemental, it will fall about 25 percent short of its target of producing 100,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition per month by the end of 2025.

Multiple people familiar with the talks who spoke to SitRep said there is increasing confidence that House Speaker Mike Johnson will take up the military aid package—which has been stalled since October—by the end of the month or early April at the latest. But that would likely be contingent on backroom wrangling to ensure that Johnson can keep the speaker’s gavel after a vote. (His predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was forced out after hard-right House Republicans turned on him over a deal to fund the government in October.)

Emergency money. It’s not unusual for the White House to ask for a bunch of money for the Pentagon in a supplemental, experts said. Back in the halcyon days of sequestration during the 2010s, the war in Afghanistan was almost entirely funded out of an emergency pot of money dubbed “Overseas Contingency Operations,” or OCO.

“If you look at the whole history of the sequester years the overseas contingency fund was just another name for supplementals and [Department of Defense] admitted over time that most of that funding should really have been in the base but under the ground rules of the sequester it had to be designated as ‘emergency’ and carried in OCO,” Arnold Punaro, a retired two-star Marine general and former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee who now works as a defense industry consultant, told SitRep in an email.

But there are increasing questions about whether it’s a smart way of doing business at a time when the United States is preparing for potential conflicts with larger militaries like Russia and China, not smaller counterinsurgency fights with terror groups.

“Now you’re beginning to see hardcore things like the submarine industrial base, and triad extension on the ground side, and you’re seeing basic things like artillery shells, it’s all being put into the supplemental,” Jeb Nadaner, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial policy, told SitRep in a phone interview. “Why everyone seems comfortable with this arrangement, having two budgets for the year, I don’t know.”

Let’s Get Personnel

Biden’s nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to Haiti, career diplomat Dennis Hankins, was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday. He will have his work cut out for him.

Judd Devermont, formerly Biden’s top National Security Council official for African affairs, has joined the advisory firm Kupanda Capital.

Diana Shaw is leaving her post as the acting State Department inspector general next month, a U.S. official confirmed to SitRep. (Kudos to Politico for first reporting this.) Shaw took the helm as the department’s top internal watchdog back in 2020, during a, shall we say, hectic time for Foggy Bottom.

On the Button 

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Russian nukes. Russia has moved tactical nuclear weapons into neighboring Belarus, putting them several hundred miles closer to NATO territory, Western officials confirmed to Jack and Robbie. The move is likely to put more pressure on NATO’s eastern flank, as it comes with Russian President Vladimir Putin continuing to saber-rattle about possible nuclear-weapons use in Ukraine or in a larger conflict with the West. And the Baltic countries are warning that the risk of Western inaction is high. “We would like to see a harder response on that,” said Arvydas Anusauskas, Lithuania’s defense minister. “If [the] Russians move nuclear weapons closer to us, we need to move as well.”

The TikTok tick-tock. The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that could result in a ban on the Chinese-owned short-form video app TikTok, our colleague Rishi Iyengar reports. The bill would put a countdown on TikTok’s Chinese ownership, giving the popular app’s holding company, the Beijing-based ByteDance, 180 days to divest ownership to a company that’s not from a country hostile to the United States. The bill awaits a Senate vote, but it already has fans in high places. Biden has already said that he will sign the bill if it gets to his desk.

Backchannel. The Biden administration held indirect negotiations with Iran through Omani interlocutors in January, the Financial Times reports, during which the U.S. urged Tehran to get Yemen’s Houthi rebel group, which Iran supports, to pull back attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea and even brought up Iran’s nuclear program. White House Middle East czar Brett McGurk and State Department deputy special envoy for Iran Abram Paley shared the messages with Omani officials, who passed them along to Iranian representatives, according to the reports. It was the first engagement between the two sides since a prisoner swap in September, but there has been no follow-up meeting, and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have continued.

Irish woes. The White House is gearing up for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration this weekend, but as the Washington Post reports, it could be a tense affair as Biden hosts Irish leaders who have been outspoken in their condemnation of the U.S. stance on the Israel-Hamas war.

Meanwhile, out in Texas, all Irish bands slated to play at the massive annual SXSW festival canceled their performances over the festival’s links to the U.S. military and U.S. defense industry, citing U.S. military support for Israel in its war with Hamas. In total, over 80 musicians and panelists from the U.S. and elsewhere have joined the boycott.

Snapshot 

Military personnel raise the Swedish flag during Sweden’s NATO accession ceremony, marking Sweden joining the alliance as its newest member, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on March 11. Omar Havana/Getty Images

Hot Mic

“Don’t talk about strategic autonomy, because that just sounds Gaullist and just splits Europe into old Europe and new Europe. Talk about strategic responsibility. This thing has to be developed in harmony, in strategic harmony, with the United States.”

—Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, weighing in on French President Emmanuel Macron’s talk of strategic autonomy, during a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington this week. 

Put on Your Radar

Thursday, March 14: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte are set to continue meetings in Berlin. French President Emmanuel Macron hosts European Council President Charles Michel in Paris. EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell continues his visit to Washington, D.C., for meetings with U.S. officials.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hears testimony from the Biden administration’s top Indo-Pacific officials at the State Department, Pentagon, and U.S. Agency for International Development on their Pacific Islands strategy.

Friday, March 15: Scholz and Michel meet in Berlin. Biden hosts Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office ahead of the White House’s aforementioned St. Patrick’s Day celebration on Sunday.

Sunday, March 17: Russia’s presidential election concludes. (“I wonder who will win,” the ever-quotable Sikorski quipped earlier this week.)

Monday, March 18: South Korea hosts the three-day Summit for Democracy in Seoul. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to attend in person.

Tuesday, March 19: U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin leads the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Quote of the Week

“Pure luck, I hit the goddamn target. No, I really did. Bales of hay that were, like, 20 bales of hay with a big target in the middle of the bale of hay. And so I didn’t mean anything by it. I turned to the prime minister and handed it to him and the poor son-of-a-bitch couldn’t pull it back. I was like, oh, God.”

—U.S. President Joe Biden answers a question in a federal case about whether he brought classified information as vice president to his home in Delaware with an anecdote about outshooting then-Mongolian Prime Minister Sukhbaatar Batbold in an archery demonstration during Biden’s 2011 trip to the country as vice president.

This Week’s Most Read

• The West Is Still Oblivious to Russia’s Information War by Ian Garner
• The History Crisis Is a National Security Problem by Bret Devereaux
• State Department Beefs Up U.S. Diplomatic Presence in Kyiv by Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer