TRUMP DELAYS DEFENSE PROCUREMENT BOOST, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments writes via your Morning D correspondent: The Trump administration requested $125.2 billion in procurement funding for the Pentagon in fiscal 2018, putting off any substantial growth until future years, the CSBA reports.

The president's fiscal 2018 budget request is $52 billion above the budget-control cap. The request is also three times more than the average amount by which Congress has been able to raise caps in the past. The unreconciled House and Senate budgets are about $90 billion above defense caps, according to Katherine Blakely, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).

Navy readiness-related funding has been trending higher virtually every year, according to Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. She studied the issue as part of forthcoming analysis of the president’s 2018 request for Defense Department operations and maintenance funds.

Trump’s defense budget request “is playing fourth fiddle to tax cuts, cutting non-defense discretionary by 30 percent over a decade to a record low of 1.4 percent of” gross domestic product “and balancing the federal budget within 10 years,” Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wrote in a new report.

Procedural and political hurdles “make it difficult to see how a substantial defense buildup on the order of the $54 billion proposed by the Trump administration can be realized,” said Katherine Blakeley, research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The wide gulfs between the political parties, and between the defense hawks and the fiscal hawks, will not be closed soon.”

In the absence of a budget deal, defense hawks will seek to pump more money into the overseas contingency operations account, which is not constrained by the BCA caps, Blakeley noted. “Congress’ window for funding defense — and the rest of the government — before the end of the 2017 fiscal year is short and closing fast.”

"There's a deep fundamental divide between the Freedom Caucus members in the House, the more mainline conservatives in the House and the Senate, and the Democrats in the House and Senate," said Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgeting Assessments.

Added Blakeley, "What exactly to do about defense spending is almost certainly going to get kicked down the road until about December," she said.