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The Senate Appropriations Committee approved July 20 the fiscal 2007 Defense Department budget after almost no debate. More than 500 people turned out for the committee’s markup of four budget bills, in which legislators announced their intentions to spend more than $1 trillion.

All amendments to the committee report were tabled until the bill reaches the Senate floor.

The report from the committee’s Defense Subcommittee would give DOD $453.5 billion for fiscal 2007, which includes a $50 billion bridge fund for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is $9 billion less than President Bush’s budget request and $5 billion less than the version the House passed last month.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the subcommittee, said members completed marking up the bill in 12 minutes. “I think that reflects the bipartisan nature of this bill,” he said, referring to the lack of objections from the subcommittee’s Democrats.

But in those 12 minutes, the appropriators were able to reduce the funding by cutting critical assets needed for current and future operations, Stevens said. “In order to reach that number, Sen. [Daniel] Inouye and I had to cut key defense readiness and modernization programs,” Stevens said. Inouye (D-Hawaii) is the ranking member on the subcommittee.

The lost funding went to other subcommittees for domestic programs. The full committee gave increases to the departments of Agriculture, Labor, Education, and Housing and Urban Development, among others.

Experts expressed concern about the speed of the funding approval process. Stevens “apparently thinks it’s a good thing to ram these gigantic bills through with as little debate as possible,” said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information.

The coming debate on the Senate floor is typically too brief to properly address all the defense spending issues, Wheeler said. Senators also insert personal pork projects just before a vote is taken, overwhelming the floor debate, he added.

Senators usually use the bridge fund to reinsert programs cut from the peacetime part of the bill, Wheeler said. Because the war section does not contain spending limits, programs can be placed there even though they are not directly related to the war. Then appropriators can claim they have cut the base budget, he said.