A Senate Republican fiscal hawk offered a 74-page menu of Defense Department spending cuts Thursday that could save taxpayers nearly $68 billion over 10 years. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said he and his staff had identified several categories of “non-defense spending at the Pentagon,” outlays which he said had “little to do with national security.”
At a Capitol Hill press conference, Coburn accused his fellow Senate Republicans of “having a blind eye on spending.” He summed up their approach as “It’s OK to cut spending anywhere except the Defense Department.”
But, he said “to be legitimate and have any integrity on the issue … everything has to be on the table.”
In the fiscal year which ended Sept. 30, defense outlays amounted to $651 billion, 18 percent of total federal spending, which was a decline of about 3 percent from the prior fiscal year.
One target of Coburn’s proposed cuts is personnel. He said there were too many admirals and other high-ranking officers for the size of the military. “We almost now have an admiral for every ship in the Navy,” he told reporters.
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