Armed Services chief: Panel to scrutinize war fund

The head of the House Armed Services Committee is vowing to closely scrutinize a proposed $96 billion for the Defense Department’s war fund in fiscal 2016.

{mosads}“We’re going to mark up [Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)] for specific programs like we mark up the base,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) told reporters Tuesday after a hearing.

“We are going to be more specific in how we authorize that funding than, at least, we have been in the last few years,” he added.

Thornberry said he is “in conversations with the Senate and the appropriators to make sure we’re all on the same page on how that’s done and that we all do it the same way and so forth.” 

Before the for Easter recess, the full House approved a $3.8 trillion budget that included $523 billion in base defense spending and $96 billion for OCO, often referred to as the war fund.

While the House and Senate Budget committees hammer out the final “topline” numbers for spending, the Armed Services panels craft the blueprint for Pentagon policy.

President Obama’s original spending request had proposed a defense budget of $561 billion and $51 billion for war funds.

Thornberry’s comments back up a promise he made during a March 25 floor speech at the end of the contentious budget debate that his committee would go through OCO “program by program.”

The war fund’s fate will be part of the panel’s April 29 marathon markup session of the National Defense Authorization Act, he said.