In a letter to committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and ranking member Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the Democrats, most of whom are in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged the panel’s top lawmakers to authorize a smaller defense budget in this year’s policy bill compared to last year’s.
That was from The Hill, “Progressives demand defense budget cuts amid coronavirus pandemic.” Here’s more from the Washington Post:
The measure ultimately authorized $738 billion in spending — less than the $750 billion the Trump administration wanted but much more than the $644 billion the Progressive Caucus had initially floated.
Here’s the thing about defense budgets: the near impossibility of near term cuts. Just like nominal wages and prices can be “sticky” in economics, so can defense budgets.
For example, Lehman Brothers collapsed about a month before the FY 2009 budget passed at $698 billion. The following years’ budgets were $721B, $717B, $681B, and then FY 2013 with $610 billion. Some of that is political due to jobs in districts and some from wartime demands in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Another part, however, is that defense processes require a couple years lead time to signal declining budgets to work that into plans. After all, defense acquisition programs have funds registered five years into the future, and in any case had already been approved with lifecycle cost estimates and schedules.
One might think that Covid-19 happened at a good time in terms of Congressional cuts. The FY 2021 President’s Budget was provided to Congress in February 2020, and they have until the start of October to approve cuts without another encountering continuing resolution.
But in reality, significant cuts to FY 2021 are incredibly difficult. The FY 2021 defense budget is the result of a two year process with tens of thousands of individual line items. The Progressive Caucus may think it’s as simple as, “let’s move $X billion out of Defense and move it to pandemic support.” But then the question is, from which line items and how much? Now you get into real debates.
The Progressives may quickly point at nuclear recapitalization and say, “let’s kill that set of programs!” Whether or not you think that’s a good idea, suffice it to say that’s a hard pill to swallow for many Congress members concerned with great power competition, not to mention all the jobs in people’s districts that would be affected. Of course, AOC is pretty well protected from downturns in defense spending in NYC, but Pressley in Boston and Tlaib in Detroit might have a harder time.
The point is that if Congress wanted to make significant cuts, it would send the defense bureaucracy into a frenzy of fire drills to understand the impact of any number of constantly updating changes and alternatives. This becomes the program managers number one concern, taking a great deal of attention away from executing programs and managing contractors.
Not only is the FY 2021 budget pretty well fixed, but the FY 2022 budget is already being programmed. Program officials need clear guidance on what they think the overall budget will be in FY 2022 and beyond to make priority decisions. But that’s the exact opposite of how defense budgets were intended to work. Programming the budget through a requirements process was supposed to flip the old paradigm. Whereas in the 1950s, it used to be: Here’s a topline, split that up amongst the services, and then maximize within that constraint. Since the 1960s PPBS reforms, the defense budget is “built up” from individual needs of weapon systems programs based on military requirements.
Indeed, the intent of “programming” the budget to line items like the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent was to give top officials in OSD and in Congress the ability to determine priorities and make selective cuts. But the fact of the matter is that Congress simply doesn’t have the personnel or knowledge to make selective cuts. As Peter Levine quipped, there’s not a line item for waste in the Pentagon.
Let’s say GBSD acquisition cost is expected to be $100 billion. If Congress wants to cut 10 percent out of GBSD in FY 2021, then does that mean GBSD should “stretch out” for more years, ultimately consuming the same $100 billion? What effect does that have on current plans to obligate funds to existing and future contracts?
Or Congress may tell the Pentagon to make technical tradeoffs in payload, range, speed, and so forth. Congress isn’t generally informed enough to say that a particular solid-fuel rocket specification is non-optimal and money could be saved by moving to another option. Perhaps the technical tradeoffs involved to lower costs make the whole Analysis of Alternatives flip on its head to a different system or architecture.
So Congressional cuts tend to seem arbitrary unless they cancel the entire program. And yet defense programs, one registered as a program of record, are rarely cancelled, especially at the MDAP level. But this is perhaps the optimal course of action for Congress rather than across the board cuts. And certainly, in the case of GBSD, that is a strategic decision that properly sits in the White House and Congress.
But GBSD will consume $100 billion over the course of more than a decade. To get the sums required, this process would have to be repeated several times and the number of districts impacted will quickly rise and members will be notified that their programs have been targeted. The whole thing almost seems to become self defeating because its hard to know what to cut, and then when you figure it out you now know exactly whose jobs you cut and face resistance. This takes a lot of attention away from the other economic and health crises which are precipitating financial difficulties.
Congress need not fall into this trap. If Congress provided major organizations a budget ceiling — in the way Congress did during the 1950s all the way back to our founding fathers — then Congress doesn’t decide at the time of the vote what programs are cut and by how much. That is left to the Pentagon to figure out in the year of execution.
Of course, Congress can always tell the Pentagon it can’t do something. The question is whether the Pentagon should need Congress’ pre-approval to do anything at all, or to trade one thing off against another.
What he have are programmed budgets. This means Congress can’t just take some off the top. Well, it did in FY 2013 during sequestration, across the board cuts to defense programs without discretion. But usually it must decide precisely which programs get cut and how much, or as the Pentagon to reformulate the budget, or making requests to run fire drills on alternative cuts because its staff honestly doesn’t know. All these tradeoffs must happen before a budget gets passed, massively upsetting Pentagon program plans that have been in the works for 2 years at minimum, and in some cases for decades.
By contrast, an organizational budget would assume flexibility in the first place. The Pentagon wouldn’t set budget plans years ahead of time for every project line item. It could absorb cuts or increases with far less notice by making tradeoffs in the year of execution. “You have to take 10 percent off? OK fine, sir. I can’t tell you what that means today, but we’ll work within your constraints.” The budget can get passed by Congress, and over the course of time program choices can be made and Congress can weigh in through an iterative conversation.
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