Congress controls the movement of funds between program elements, such as between two space development programs (say, GPS Space Segment and GPS Follow on). For RDT&E, the most DoD can move without congressional prior approval is $10 million or 20 percent, whichever is less. With roughly 30 reprogrammings approved by Congress each year, dollars are locked into programs from two years before.
A big question is, if Congress controls programs at that level, why didn’t they make each program element an appropriation? Indeed, at one time Thomas Jefferson intended it that way, to request “specific sums to every specific purpose susceptible of definition.” Luckily, Alexander Hamilton and his own Treasury Secretary persuaded him not to.
Budgets were based on major organizations and classes of payment like personnel and facilities for a long time. Congress did not decide on funding or requirements of individual weapons programs. Then came Robert McNamara and the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System. Specific weapons programs were fundamental units of financial control. Yet in the early years of the PPBS, Congress did not receive a budget justification with specific sums for each program as is done today. Program information was kept internal to the Pentagon.
Below is a chart presented by ASD(Comptroller) Charles Hitch to the Congress in a hearing on 1964 Appropriations (reproduced and annotated by me):
The top three boxes on the left were all that was visible to Congress directly through the budget request. This had been the primary structure since the enactment of Title IV of the National Security Act Amendment and the first performance budget build in 1953. (This is a longer story.)
In that 1964 Appropriations hearing, Senator Richard Russell asked why shouldn’t the program structure be brought out into the open as their own appropriations — essentially the concept Thomas Jefferson proposed nearly 160 years earlier.
Senator RUSSELL. What objection did the Bureau of the Budget make to specific appropriations for these activities rather than having it hidden in the appropriations of 10 or 12 different agencies or departments? It would seem to me that they would be glad to bring it out into the open, where the people would know what these activities were costing, rather than to carry it in 10 or 15 different appropriations bills.
Mr. HITCH. We have a letter from the Bureau of the Budget, sir, which I would be happy to put into the record.
Senator RUSSELL. Does it indicate that they would ever consider bringing these expenditures out where every citizen would know what they are, instead of keeping them hidden in 10 or 12 different agencies?
Mr. HITCH. The letter simply states they have no other practical way of handling this matter than the way it has been handled in the past.
And here’s the most relevant part of that Bureau of the Budget letter:
It does not appear from the relevant hearings and congressional committee reports that the funding of these functions created a major concern in the Congress.
In other words, the Bureau of the Budget did not think Congress had a “major concern” in “these functions” — i.e., the program classification. Of course, there’s also a conflict between program and budget structure, because unless you stop controlling types of investment accounts and military services, a single military program will often include multiple budget line items. And then how do you account for those program expenditures?
It’s not clear to me exactly how DoD got the the current structure of program elements nested underneath budget activities. Programmatic changes used to be a SecDef responsibility in the Program Change Proposal process. With program elements exposed in the budget, they reprogramming became controlled by Congress.
It is clear, however, that the FY 1964 budget was the first to include the current style of budget activities for RDT&E that shifted from commodity classification (e.g., missiles and related equipment) to a lifecycle classification (e.g., basic research, applied research, prototyping, development).
Final caveat: moving funds between appropriations is a different prior approval process, called transfer authority, than what reprogrammings go through, and there’s no below-threshold-transfer within DoD’s discretion like there is for reprogramming.
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