DoD’s Comptroller puts out budget execution data every quarter in a form called the DD1416s, which basically hasn’t changed since the early 1960s. It details all the reprogramming, or movement of funds between line items, that the DoD does within a fiscal year. Of course, there are Above Threshold Reprogrammings (ATRs) which require Congressional prior approval (for example, if more than $10 million or 20%, whichever is less, of the line is moved in or out of a Budget Line Item in Procurement). Movements lower than appropriation-specific thresholds are within DoD’s control and called Below Threshold Reprogrammings (BTRs).
Below is a chart of net ATRs by appropriation in millions of dollars. Positive values mean that more money was moved into the accounts than out, while negative means they were bill payers. For the Procurement accounts, I broke out munitions related lines from other lines. You’ll see that in munitions had been bill payers in FY 2019 through FY 2021 to the total of 765 million. In FY 2022, munitions procurement increased by nearly $5 billion!
To give you some perspective, these munitions accounts (listed below) received $12.4 billion in appropriations for FY 2022. That means DoD added 40% to munitions procurement through ATRs!
Usually Operations & Maintenance (O&M) got the short shrift in the budget to pay for modernization, and then ended up receiving a lot of ATRs. Ostensibly due to Ukraine, it was the big bill payer that enabled munitions by giving up almost $6 billion.
Remember, these ATRs are approved in advance by Congress and are internal trades within DoD’s budget — it does not include the various supplemental appropriations provided to DoD in response to the conflict in Ukraine.
[UPDATE: Thanks to a reader for informing me that the supplemental appropriations for replenishing munitions were dropped into a defense-wide O&M account, and then reprogrammed into Procurement. So these were not internal trades. O&M was not the bill payer!]
And here are the munition line items that got the biggest additions in FY 2022. The big winner was Javelins with $1.45 billion added. 155mm artillery rounds added $551 million. HIMARS and GMLRS added $739 million. MANPADS and Patriot air defense added $794 million.
By the way, the munitions accounts did not include torpedos or strategic missiles. Here are the selected budget activities.
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