The Senate appropriators have been struggling all week to complete a companion bill to the one passed in the House last week, providing money for this fiscal year for DOD and several other federal agencies.

The disagreements and more than 100 potential amendments (easier to offer in the Senate than in the House) have delayed consideration into next week, but it looks likely that there will be an FY 2013 appropriations bill for the Defense Department before they adjourn for Easter.

Meanwhile, both the House and Senate Budget Committees have reported out longer-term budgetary plans -- the budget resolutions -- that look at FY 2014 and beyond.

There is a fundamental reality about what the Congress is doing, one on which Secretary Hagel must focus. The signals are clear: The Senate and the House are not going to use the appropriations bills or the budget resolutions to bail out DOD from the sequester and a long-term drawdown in the defense budget. Time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Flexibility to deal with sequestration was one such signal. The House appropriations bill did not give DOD any greater flexibility than it now has to reprogram or transfer monies between accounts. It did increase operations funding, like the administration had requested, which raises the baseline from which sequestration would happen. And it provided some legislative relief from provisions in last year's defense budget, which would have hamstrung DOD unless they got a new bill covering this year.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski made a more direct attack to provide transfer flexibility. But it failed, and the reason for the failure is significant: Unless every agency got that flexibility, it was clear that it was not going to pass. Defense was not going to get special treatment.

Signal two is in the budget resolutions. As I noted earlier this week, Chairman Ryan's bill folded on the hope that DOD might get more funding in the long-term than the Budget Control Act caps passed in August 2011. He tried that last year and it went nowhere -- it wasn't even useful to Mitt Romney, who argued in his campaign that DOD should get four percent of the Gross Domestic Product.

This year, he abandoned that trench for the next one: holding the line at the BCA level for the next 10 years. That's probably the high-water mark, because Sen. Patty Murray's proposal takes another $240 billion out of the BCA funding levels over the next ten years.

The administration is going to send up its budget, one day. Maybe in early April. And it is going to be a mythical beast that ignores the signals. It will hope for the BCA levels, which is just plain unrealistic.

Secretary Hagel is supposed to send out guidance for the Department's next Quadrennial Defense Review next week. If realism is going to set in at DOD, that guidance had better make the QDR a resource-driven effort and start looking at decisions and options at budget levels below the BCA caps. That would send the internal signal the services need to hear.

The dance performance at the edge of the cliff continues. Boehner offers to let taxes return to their pre-2001 level for the very, very rich. The president counter-offers, putting lower Social Security COLAs on the table, much to the consternation of AARP, who fill the in-boxes of people over 50 with protest (including mine).

Boehner, in theatrical frustration, moves to a Plan B that would have the House vote to raise the millionaire tax and spare the rest. Grover emerges from the dark shadow he lives in to pat Boehner on the back, saying a vote for the millionaire tax would not violate the no tax pledge the Republicans have signed, even though it does.

Meanwhile, in the defense world, nails are being bitten. Secretary Panetta warns of a cataclysm if the president and Boehner fail to agree. Buck McKeon steps to the mike in a redux of the performance he has been executing for 18 months (isn't he tired?), decrying the fact that the Boehner tax bill left the sequester on the table, and our national security open to the barbarians. In response, Boehner added a provision that would protect defense from at least part of the sequester. (Though sequester would take only 10 percent of the resources from one of the highest defense budgets America has seen since the end of World War II.)

A deal will come, but only when the dancers are exhausted with this increasingly embarrassing performance. And when it does, what will really happen to defense? If the White House offer is any indication, not much. Defense and domestic discretionary spending have been a "residual" in the budget negotiations for months, with entitlements and revenues the leading edge of the argument.

In its latest offer, the White House has reportedly said it would make another $200 billion in discretionary spending cuts, over ten years, split 50/50 between defense and domestic discretionary spending. That would be a laughable $100 billion less for defense over ten years from the current budget projection.

Yes, that is a cut, Virginia, as the current projection would give DOD growth at the rate of inflation. But as a budget proposition, it is a joke. Senate and House appropriators regularly, annually, find $5-10 billion tucked away in the defense budget that they can use to fund things the Pentagon did not ask for, but members want.

Where do they find it? In re-estimates of the payout rate on existing contracts, in lower than projected rates of inflation (the hidden secret of defense budgeting -- project high rates of inflation, then save and reprogram the money after you get it), in lower spending for operations and maintenance (just a general O&M cut by another name -- let the Pentagon find the savings), in finding operations savings in Afghanistan because the troops are coming home faster than expected (used that one once already; more to come).

Oh, there is a lot of slush of this kind in the DOD budget and the appropriators know how to find it all when the "members' requests" come in. So, go ahead, try to tell me that $10 billion a year less than the overall budget projection is tough to manage. It's not; it is a walk in the park.

Defense will be lucky to have this "cut." And, of course, the luck will not last. Every year for the next ten years there will be more nibbles at defense, because defense can "take it" in budgetary terms.

About ten years from now we will turn around and realize how deeply we have cut defense from the peak year (war and base budget) of fiscal year 2010. The way to count that is to take that peak year and draw a line, calculating what the defense budget would have been for the next ten years, had we simply increased that amount by inflation. Then draw another line -- the one that nibbles at DOD's budget every year for the next ten years. The space between those two lines will be more than a trillion dollars.

And if that drawdown is well managed, we will not even notice its impact. The forces will be smaller, but still globally dominant, doing everything we asked them to do. And we will have taken more than a trillion dollars from projected defense budgets, which is what so many "defenders of defense" are rending their garments over today. No sweat.