The Cabinet is mulling a new special budget act to fund critical defense programs, a source said yesterday, after opposition lawmakers on Friday rejected the Cabinet’s NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.77 billion) military spending plan and passed a reduced bill that capped the budget at NT$780 billion.
The Executive Yuan’s proposal included funding for the “T-Dome,” artificial intelligence (AI)-boosted kill chains and the indigenous arms industry, the Cabinet official said on condition of anonymity.
The programs are mutually supporting components of the nation’s defense strategy that cannot be removed without harming the whole, they said.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
President William Lai (賴清德) deemed the omission unacceptable for national security and has told the Executive Yuan to rectify the shortfalls in military spending at once, the source said, adding that the Cabinet believes it would not be feasible to propose the special budget act again under the current political climate.
The cut defense programs cannot be added to the annual general budget, as that would increase national debt by more than 15 percent, the maximum stipulated by the Public Debt Act (公共債務法), the official said.
Any attempt to rein in national debt after including the defense items would have come at the expense of social welfare and healthcare expenditures, which is unacceptable to the administration, they added.
Therefore, the Cabinet plans to draft a new special budget act for programs it deems essential for the nation’s military defense, but that opposition parties have refused to fund, the official said.
Meanwhile, in response to the US Department of State welcoming the defense budget’s passage and worries that further delays would be a “concession to the Chinese Communist Party,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) said the KMT was exercising fiscal discipline to avoid increasing national debt.
“We support the appropriate inclusion of items in the annual defense budget and ask that the Ministry of National Defense not to delay the process,” she said.
KMT Legislator Cheng Cheng-chien (鄭正鈐) denied that the slashes to the budget would create gaps in Taiwan’s military capabilities.
The parts of the budget the opposition refused to endorse could be added to the annual budget or proposed in a supplementary budget, he said.
Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Wang An-hsiang (王安祥) said a resolution was passed on Friday that expressed approval for deepening bilateral collaborations with the US.
Separately yesterday, Lai said the Legislative Yuan made a small first step toward providing for national defense, but it was not enough to pay for the arms Taiwan has ordered from the US.
To the detriment of national security, the legislature failed to authorize allocations for buying weapon systems from domestic manufacturers, paying contractors and subsidizing Taiwan’s defense industry, he said.
“There is no room for haggling when it comes to national security and we wish that the political parties in the legislature would work toward securing the nation, stabilizing society and facilitating economic growth,” Lai said.
Additional reporting by Wang Shu-hsiu
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