Senate, House both pass defense bills Funds earmarked for work at Bath Iron Works, Brunswick Naval Air Station

WASHINGTON – The House on Thursday passed a $355 billion defense spending bill that includes a pay raise for military personnel and some of the biggest funding increases for the military in decades.

Minutes later across the Capitol, the Senate approved a $393 billion bill that maps out defense spending policy for the fiscal year 2003 beginning Oct. 1 and seeks to lay out a delicate compromise on the budget for a missile defense system.

In completing the two defense bills before leaving for its July Fourth recess, Congress responded to the urgings of President Bush that it put defense at the top of its legislative list. “They don’t need to delay the defense bill in a time of war,” he said in a speech earlier this week.

The Senate bill, passed 97-2, authorizes or approves military spending programs for the Pentagon and other agencies, such as the Energy Department, with military functions: The House passed its version last month. The House spending bill, passed 413-18, details specific spending for the fiscal year.

It was the first of 13 appropriations bills that Congress must pass every year. The Senate has yet to act on it.

The Senate bill, some $50 billion above last year’s legislation, includes a $10 billion contingency fund requested by the administration that would be available for the war against terrorism.

It approves a 4.1 percent pay raise for all military personnel and a new incentive pay of up to $1,500 per month to reward military members who agree to serve in difficult-to-fill assignments.

Funding earmarked for Maine in the Senate bill includes more than $2 billion for the construction of two DDG-51 destroyers by Bath Iron Works; $960 million for the design of the new DD-X warships, to be split between BIW and Ingalls Shipyard in Mississippi; and more than $100 million in upgrades to planes and facilities at the Brunswick Naval Air Station.

The Democratic-controlled Senate cut more than $800 million from the president’s $7.6 billion request for development of a national missile defense system. Seeking to remove a veto threat, the Senate on Wednesday agreed to language stating that – in the event extra money becomes available to the Pentagon – the Senate believes that money should go to fighting terrorism but would give the president the option to use it for missile defense.

Despite the compromise on the missile defense budget, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a House hearing Thursday that the Senate restrictions still were unacceptable. The cuts, he said, would “severely delay” efforts to build a prototype defense system for long-range missiles and cripple the Pentagon’s efforts to develop defenses that target missiles in their boost phase, shortly after they are launched.

The administration last month officially withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans missile defense systems, and immediately began work on a rudimentary system in Alaska.

Separately, the Senate approved amendments by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, that would ban research and development of nuclear-armed interceptors for missile defense systems, and by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., requiring the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency to file classified and unclassified reports of its testing.