NDAA page count has been skyrocketing, hits 4,408 pages in FY23

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the big national security policy legislation. It is separate from appropriations which provides actual funding to program authorized in the NDAA. Never call the NDAA a “spending bill!” Defense insiders will love to pounce on you — don’t give them the pleasure.

Interestingly enough, there was no NDAA until FY 1962, which started out at a scant one page. Here’s an excerpt from the first Senate report on the FY 1962 NDAA:

The authorization of appropriations that the bill provides is of the lump-sum type. The specific types of aircraft, missiles, and naval vessels to be procured with appropriations authorized by the bill are not designated in the bill itself. This form of authorization is consistent with the strong desire of the Department of Defense for flexibility in these procurement programs.

Despite the broad flexibility provided in the NDAA and in appropriations, FY 1962 was also the beginning of tighter restrictions on reprogramming for procurement quantities of aircraft, missiles, and naval vessels. Over time, restrictions grew as well as policy mandates coming down from the NDAA, as perhaps indicated by page length:

• It started at 1 page in FY 1962
• It exceeded 10 pages in FY 1970
• It exceeded 100 pages in FY 1985
• It exceeded 1,000 pages in FY 2020
• It exceeded 4,000 pages in FY 2023

The FY 2023 NDAA is 4,408 pages of text. When you look at it on a chart, it looks like it is going vertical. It might be easier to look at in log-linear terms, which is best used for things that grow exponentially.

In the below, I take the natural log of the page count, shown on the y-axis. It is easier to see how growth was pretty fast in the first couple decades, but still the page count was under 100 in total until the Goldwater-Nichols years of the mid-to-late 1980s were you saw another explosive growth. The NDAA then flattened in the 1990s until the FY 2016 series of management reform and has been growing particularly fast since FY 2020.

I put a simple linear regression over this (i.e., the natural log of NDAA page count as a function of the year) to determine when the NDAA could break 10,000 pages. The estimate is another ten years, or the FY 2033 NDAA.

But it’s hard to tell. The FY 2023 NDAA nearly quadrupled the page count from FY 2020, and more than quintupled the page count from FY 2019.

While there’s been some see-sawing of page length, we haven’t seen a period of significant or sustain decreases. Perhaps the rise of information systems and bureaucratic overhead provides more “slack” for ever expanding sets of policies, reports, and direction.

Ultimately — trends that cannot persist indefinitely will eventually break down. Healthcare cannot become 100% of GDP, even if it’s on track to do so. Neither can the NDAA become infinitely long… or so we might hope.