Pentagon to Tap Leftover Military Pay Funding
“The Pentagon is planning to tap $1 billion in leftover funds from military pay and pension accounts to help President Donald Trump pay for his long-sought border wall, a top Senate Democrat said Thursday.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL ‘It’s coming out of military pay and pensions. $1 billion. That’s the plan.
The funds are available because Army recruitment is down and a voluntary early military retirement program is being underutilized.’
The development comes as Pentagon officials are seeking to minimize the amount of wall money that would come from military construction projects that are so cherished by lawmakers.
‘Imagine the Democrats making that proposal — that for whatever our project is, we’re going to cut military pay and pensions.'”
Gee, did anyone ever think of tossing this into the VHA funding since the VA now has to pay for the Choice program which Trump said he will not fund.
I am no fan of ‘VA Choice’, which is a form of privatizing the VA. It includes VA funding medical care in private, for profit facilities, and could dilute VA services.
It or a similar program was implemented under Obama and did not have many takers…….
Privatizing the VA is like privatizing arsenals lots of cost and lesser results.
I prefer hanging with veterans to going to a private MD waiting room!
The money ‘reprogrammed for the wall” is not coming out of ‘executing’ military pay nor is any retiree or new retiree going to be denied anything, it was left over cash, slush from under running the current year’s expenditures.
ilsm:
The Choice Program was something put into place based on a F***ing lie. Yes, there was tampering with the dates.
Of the 40 claims, the IG disproved 34 of them. The remaining 6 they could not find enough evidence to decide on them. A Republican controlled Congress passed the Choice Program (got my – don’t know where it is – card). We got Koch Bros sponsored CVA tampering with the truth.
I’m not sure why the DoD Comptroller would want to sign off on this. Moving monies from MC&H programs to building the wall would at least fall within the same budget function/subfunction line in the appropriations. So Trump would at least have an arguable case…maybe not a winning case, but at least an arguable one. But military pay is an entirely different function/subfunction line and has a different budget execution life.
There is a normal procedure that allows the DoD Comptroller and the OMB to move monies around that are within the same subfunction and point accounts, but even that procedure requires a five calendar day waiting period for Congress to object. Any DoD Comptroller that signs off on Trump’s plan to use military pay to fund the wall might want to get measured for an orange jumpsuit at Ft Leavenworth.
2slug:
If I remember correctly. unused funds can be re-allocated by Congress if not used. They did it with parts of the ACA.