“I think we’ll raise these caps, so we can get the money we need for national defense,” Forbes, a Virginia Republican, said of the 2016 budget sent to Congress by US President Barack Obama. “I think what he did for defense was right,” Forbes said of Obama’s $561 billion defense budget, which requests approximately $38 billion over budget cap levels.
Asked whether the Congress is on a path to repeal budget sequestration under the Budget Control Act, a 2011 law which imposed strict budget caps on military and non-military government spending, the congressman stated the willingness of the majority party to set defense spending as a priority.
“[President Obama] didn’t send over a budget where he really set priorities,” Forbes noted, saying that he hopes when the final budget is set “the Republican Congress will say we have a priority on national defense.”
The US Congress received President Obama’s budget proposal on Monday morning. US lawmakers will work in the coming months to review the budget and appropriate funds to finance the US government.
The total budget is reported to be approximately $4 trillion for fiscal year 2016. Defense spending requests increased 4.4 percent for 2016 and amount to the highest base defense budget in history, according to Associated Press reports.
