Today, most of our defense funds are appropriated not to the Secretary of Defense but rather to the military departments. The Secretary of Defense and the Comptroller of the Department of Defense may place certain limitations [i.e., budget ceilings] on the use of funds by the military departments. Yet they do not have sufficient directive authority over such expenditures.
This method of providing defense funds has worked against the unity of the Department of Defense as an executive department of the Government. I strongly urge that in the future the Congress make appropriations for this Department in such fashion as to provide the Secretary of Defense adequate authority and flexibility to discharge his heavy responsibilities. This need is particularly acute in respect to his powers of strategic planning and operational direction….
On this point the law itself invites controversy. On the one hand, the National Security Act gives the Secretary of Defense “direction, authority, and control” over his entire Department. Yet the same law provides that the military departments are to be “separately administered” by their respective Secretaries. This is not merely inconsistent and confusing. It is a hinderance to efficient administration…
An example in just one area – procurement and supply – is evidence of the kind of damage caused. In this area the “separately administered” concept, as well as the needless confusion over roles and missions, impede such techniques for increased efficiency and economy as the Single Manager Plan, which would provide many of the benefits of a separate service of supply without its possible disrupting effects.
President Eisenhower’s Message, 3 April 1958. Address to the Congress. Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Service. Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1958, pp. 274-90. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1959.
Even though military budgets were supposed to be presented by program for SecDef approval, meaning that the SecDef could approve or modify the activities and plans of the military services, in reality the SecDef didn’t have control over service funding to specific programs. The Korean War created a crises and need for crash budgets that couldn’t wait for a two-year justification procedure. So the services’ budgets were primarily functional, such as applied engineering or procurement, underneath major command organizations. This severely limited the SecDef’s ability to stamp out duplication and overlap, as well as coordinate outcomes to a Single Manager Plan.
This address from Eisenhower — just months before the armistice in Korea — represented a strong move toward consolidation of power under the SecDef. The budget process took a central role, as it did back in 1949 during the debate over the amendment to the National Security Act. Viewed in this light, the rise of the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System under Robert McNamara in 1961 was not such a radical break from the past, but a strong-willed implementation of what had been desired for over a decade. It rapidly became apparent in the 1960s, however, that extreme centralization did not produce efficiency and economy as Eisenhower and nearly everyone else presumed.
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