PPBE Reform

Budget Flexibility Quotes

1. Senator Jack Reed. In a speech at the Reagan Institute: “Now One of the less glamorous subjects the Committee has been looking at is the PPBE, or Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, If you can find a more boring please contact me immediately which focuses on financial management and resource allocation for current and future defense acquisition programs.  As many of you know this process is largely a process unchanged from when Secretary McNamara and the wiz kids put it in place in 1961 – when it was a cutting-edge planning tool.  Today, however, it is likely too slow and cumbersome to meet many of DOD’s requirements to adopt new technologies in a rapid, agile manner, and needs to be updated. Again it is one of those aspects that gets little attention but has extraordinary impact on our ability to be competitive in this very challenging world.”
2. Rep. Adam Smith. In a speech at the Naval Postgraduate School: “Of course there is the procurement cycle, which to make it very simple, it’s too long. As technology is changing rapidly, if you’re saying that basically from the time you have an idea at a minimum you’re looking at two years before you can buy it — well by the time that timeline is done what you’re working on is obsolete…. For one thing we’ve got to give the pentagon greater flexibility in terms of moving money around so that they’re not locked into a two-year or five-year cycle. So it’s like you’ve got the money, this is the way you’ve got to spend it for five years no matter what innovation comes along. You’re locked into that we’ve got to open up that flexibility to enable them to make more rapid decisions.”
3. Rep. Seth Moulton. At a Hudson Institute event: “I think that’s a whole other question so we need to fix this whole budgeting and acquisition system that’s fundamentally broken and my hope is that with this mission-based pilot we might find a way to keep the oversight but have it focused on the things that matters… As a member of Congress, I can keep DoD accountable by asking that they show us how the money that they spend in a mission-based funding bucket actually meets the mission… So that’s why I’m working to establish what we’re calling a mission-based pilot which would experiment with a new way of budgeting to fix these issues. The mission-based pilot would restructure funding so that it’s tied to specific missions instead of specific hardware.”
4. Mac Thornberry. In an article for The Hill: “Today’s rapid innovation and technological change renders our industrial age approach to funding obsolete. Along with spending more in crucial areas, we need significant reform in how those funds are allocated and spent… First, the Commission recommends that Congress establish a dedicated AI fund as a near-term solution to bridge the “valley of death.”… Second, the Commission recommends a pilot program to test a portfolio management approach for requirements and budgeting to overcome the lack of flexibility in DOD’s program-centric budget process… Third, the Commission recommends establishing a single appropriation for the life cycle costs of software and digital technologies, building on an existing initiative known as the Budget Activity 8 pilot… Finally, the Commission recommends a pilot program to explore mission-focused budgeting.”
5. Heidi Shyu. Undersecretary of Defense, Research & Engineering. In Federal News Network: “Let’s say you find a great prototype someplace and you want to buy it. Well, did you have the foresight two years ago to plan it into your POM? If you didn’t, guess what? You have no authority to buy it,” Heidi Shyu, the undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering said in an interview with Federal News Network last fall. “And let’s say you’re going to plan it into your POM. Well, in two years time, maybe you’ll get the money, but the technology is already several years old. The PPBE process is too sequential, too linear, too old-fashioned. It works really well if you’re moving at a very slow, very methodical, very risk-averse pace. But in today’s world, when competition against your adversaries is key, it’s got to change.”
6. Eric Schmidt. Co-Chair of the National Security Commission on AI testimony to the SASC: “One problem is the design cycle. There’s something called a POM [Program Objective Memorandum] or Program of Record. There is a two year planning cycle ahead of doing anything. So if you want to do something new, you have to plan it, and it starts two years from that time because that’s when you get the money for it. Because of the way the appropriators work, money that is not used in a particular time are taken away unless its on a POM-based program.”
7. General Arnold Bunch. Commander of AFMC, quoted in Air Force Magazine: “What he would create is “a certain amount of money, in the year of execution, that wasn’t necessarily [connected to] any specific program at the moment.” … That would require a change to acquisition rules, he said. Such an approach would require Congress to write a certain number of blank checks for programs that don’t exist at the time a defense budget is signed into law. However, the process of fielding a response to even an urgent requirement can take years, and there may be no standing requirement that the new idea addresses. “The way our budgeting system is set up right now,” he said, if a seemingly good idea didn’t work out, the money could not be applied to a different approach. “Those dollars would be taken away and put on something else,” he said.”
8. Manager’s Guide to Technology Transition in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. The 2003 DoD guide found: “The PM community often has a difficult time synchronizing the technology transition funding. The PPBS requires a two-year lead-time for funding to be proved. As a result, accommodating fast-changing S&T developments in acquisition programs can be a challenge. The PM community cannot always predict the pace of innovation two years in advance, and funding may not be available for fast-moving S&T projects that are ready for transition. Therefore, a desirable S&T project may stall for 18 to 24 months, awaiting funding. This gap is sometimes called the “valley of death.””
9. United States Space Force. May 2020 report, Alternative Acquisition System for the United States Space Force. “Managing space programs at the portfolio level will allow the USSF to evolve more effectively for the warfighter and more efficiently for the taxpayer. Consolidating BLIs [budget line items] to manage USSF space programs at portfolio levels is the most important recommendation in this report”
10. Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt, USAF. Speaking with Jared Serbu on Gearing up for great power competition. “We have got to figure out a way to let Congress oversee us without the use of subdivided appropriations down to the gnat’s eyelash. We’re gonna have to provide more funding flexibility in broad portfolios of capabilities and allow more fungibility between what we invest in, in execution year. The idea of appropriating a certain dollar for a certain purpose for a certain program with a certain contractor immediately destroys our monopsonistic advantage. It limits the flexibility to such a degree that we can’t compete with China or Russia in terms of the speed of decision-making that is necessary. These are the things I’d love to have real serious conversations about with the staffers on the Hill — not to avoid oversight, but to reinvent oversight.” and in Federal News Network: ““I think the budgeting process definitely needs to change. I’m really proud of the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee for recognizing that,” he said. “I think the appropriators need to be involved in that discussion as well…“I’m actually more urgently interested in the oversight inside of execution year,” Holt said. “I do understand these arguments…I do think that we as a nation have got to start thinking about how do we allow for some judgment and some decision making at the point of attack at the point of execution. Where we can avoid holes in maybe dozens of acquisition programs that we did not anticipate? Can we rapidly move money to an emerging technology we had no idea existed a year ago?”
11. Committee on Improving Processes and Policies for the Acquisition and Test of Information Technologies in the Department of Defense. Writing in their 2010 report: “In the longer term, the DOD could work with Congress to establish a new set of funding mechanisms for IT-supported requirements that would align congressional funding with mission or capability areas rather than with individual acquisition programs. Under this concept, Congress would allocate funding to a mission area that would be governed in the DOD through a process similar to portfolio management. In implementing this concept, DOD officials would be responsible for setting priorities and allocating the funding to individual IT projects after the congressional appropriation of funds to a portfolio of mission requirements.”
12. Christopher O’Donnell. Acting ASD(Acquisition) at the 2021 GMU/DAU conference: “What the MTA has shown is that the JCIDS process and the time it takes to make all the sausage maybe isn’t as necessary as we thought it was. We are totally rethinking the entire what we call Big “A” acquisition process in the Department. It’s not just what are we doing in the acquisition system with the Adaptive Acquisition Framework, it’s how do we reform the requirements process and the PPBE. Until the three of those are lined up well we can’t pull things through the system quickly. Secretary Kendall said that this is why says it takes 10 years to get anything done. It takes two years two years to get money, two years to write the requirement, it takes four years to figure out what you’re doing and then two years to go ahead and get it out. We need to cut a lot of that out. The funding cycle — we need to field hypersonic weapons. We can’t wait until the ’24 budget to do that.”
13. General Arnold Bunch. Commander of Air Force Materiel Command in an Air Force Magazine interview:  “The idea would be to “put a certain amount of money into our budget … with the expectation that a certain number of things” would be chosen for a quick acquisition at scale, “with the intent to then put it in our POM [program objective memoranda] and carry it forward.”… What he would create is “a certain amount of money, in the year of execution, that wasn’t necessarily [connected to] any specific program at the moment.””
14. Megan Milam. Chief of government relations at Anduril and former appropriations staffer wrote: “The Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) was designed, under Secretary McNamara, with mid-20th century technology, geopolitical realities, and management philosophy in mind. It is decades overdue for a substantial review. We commend SASC in the strongest possible terms for committing to its reform.[3] We hope, too, that the PPBE commission considers changes to the requirements process, i.e. the ways in which DoD determines which systems it wishes to purchase. Often the requirements process — which is lengthy, overly prescriptive, and biased towards the hardware components of new systems — does as much as the subsequent process of acquisitions to stunt innovation and keep innovative companies away from defense work.”
15. Joshua Marcuse. Quoted in a Politico article: “Joshua Marcuse, a Google executive who was executive director of the Defense Innovation Board until last year, said most defense leaders know that the PPBE process is the mortal enemy of innovation, but they are also despondent about what can be done about it.”Privately, they will all admit that this is the most vexing conundrum they faced as a leader,” he said. “Very few of them believe that we have it within ourselves as a society to fix it. It is a suicide pact that we made with ourselves that we don’t believe we have the ability to change this.”
16. DoD Prototyping Handbook. USD(R&E), 2021 “DoD’s Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process makes it difficult for prototyping projects to obtain necessary funding when it’s needed. The PPBE process takes nearly two years from the time a funding need is identified to the time funding is available. In the fast-paced world of technology development, this lag in funding can prevent the timely development and deployment of a capability needed to address an emerging threat.”
17. Pierre Sprey. Testimony to Congress in 1971: “If it is possible to arrange funding in such a way that you work under fixed pots, as I call them, for each service or perhaps even better for each mission that the Congress and the administration wishes to see accomplished, then I think you have created the atmosphere in which a service can properly judge the extent to which they want to trade simplicity and low cost versus complexity and small numbers.”
18. Bryan Smith. National Security Institute at George Mason University. In a Government Matters interview: “I think the Pentagon is going to look in the long term to the last frontier of acquisition reform, which is the budget process. One idea I heard was to consolidate these hundreds of budget lines into meaningful portfolios that are managed by empowered Program Executive Officers. For that to happen, Congress is going to have to relinquish some budget authority. So that’s where the Pentagon is really going to need Congress to help with acquisition reform.”
19. Doug Bush. Assistant Secretary of the Army, Acquisition Technology & Logistics in Federal News Network. ““It will require us to come up with plans and then engage with Congress because ultimately they have to give us flexibility in research and development
    accounts, for example, to do things during the year, so to speak, that weren’t planned in advance,” he said…Re-programming money for field contingencies is a regular and fairly frequent occurrence during war, as it was during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “We need to try to move that behavior from kind of wartime behavior to just more the stuff we do routinely,” Bush said. Doing so will require the trust of lawmakers, he acknowledged. The Army can earn that trust by making solid, evidence-based cases for the kind of budget flexibilities that all the services need today, Bush said.”
20. Henry Jehan Jr. In a 1991 US Army War College dissertation: “The funds for all the programs under the management control of a PEO should be given to the PEO in a single account. The PEO should have the authority to freely manage and reprogram the funds so that optimal accomplishment of all  programs/projects/products is achieved. The Congress should limit their participation in this process to authorizing or prohibiting an acquisition at the critical program junctures and providing funding to the group of programs managed by the PEO. The funding managed by the PEO should be protected or fenced from all operational accounts.”
21. Aaron Wildavsky. Famed political theorist wrote: “Program budgeting does not work anywhere in the world it has been tried. The reason for this failure can be deduced backward. What would it be like if we had it? Program budgeting is like the simultaneous equation of society in the sky. If program budgeting worked, every program would be connected to every other with full knowledge of the consequences, and all social problems would be solved simultaneously… Line-item budgeting, precisely because its categories (personnel, maintenance, supplies) do not relate directly to programs, are easier to change. Budgeting by programs, precisely because money flows to objectives, makes it difficult to abandon objectives without abandoning simultaneously the organization that gets its money for them.”
22. LTG David Deptula (ret.). Former USAF Lt. General, dean of the Mitchell Institute. “I love your idea of a mission funded account… In the past, you’ve got to design the whole enchilada from the beginning. Generally, what happens and why we end up with delays is that there is discovery as one proceeds with the development of program. And then people get taken to task because ‘wait a second, you said you’re going to do this, and then you did this, and there was a delay here.’ Why was there a delay? Because there was discovery. So what you lay out is something that needs to be explored. Maybe we don’t design the whole enchilada up front.”
23. Forrest Shull. Reseracher at Carnegie Mellon’s SEI. Writing of JIDO’s budget in a May 2019 vignette for Defense Innovation Board, Implementing Continuous Delivery: The JIDO Approach: “JIDO operates in an agile paradigm in which requirements can emerge and get reprioritized, it is difficult for the organization to justify budget requests upfront in the way that their command chain requires. JIDO addresses this today by creating notional, detailed mappings of functionality to release milestones. Since a basic principle of the approach is that capabilities being developed can be modified or re-prioritized with input from the warfighter, this predictive approach provides little or no value to the JIDO teams themselves. Even though JIDO refuses to map functionality in this way more than 2 years out, given that user needs can change significantly  in that time, the program has had to add headcount just to pull these reports together.”
24. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. In a 2002 report on Command and Control programs, argues for program element consolidation according to “individual command centers and nodes”: “The size of individual PEs varies widely from $500 million per year to $100,000 per year. Given that each PE drives an overhead structure… some savings in effort if not in people can be made by consolidation. In addition, consolidation in some logical sequence will provide the much-needed flexibility to quickly react with funding to solve issues or leverage new technology without reprogramming. The structure of the consolidation needs careful attention, as each of the PEs carries a constituency in terms of military, industrial, and congressional proponents. Two methods of logically cataloging the C2 PEs were considered: by node (as in AOC, Control and Reporting Center, Airborne Warning and Control System [AWACS], etc.) or by capability (as in ground target attack, air target attack, etc.).”
25. Eric Fanning. Former Secretary of the Army. Speaking to Congress on February 5, 2020.”We should also look for ways that returning to Congress doesn’t needlessly slow down development. Oversight is critical, but technology moves faster than our budget process. For example, program managers and PEOs might be given wider flexibility for program spending in the early phases when they are still defining costs.”
26. Capt. Mark Vandroff (ret.). Former PM for the DDG-51. He proposed a “6.3-and-a-half” account. Vandroff: “I think you need a separate appropriation for — and management of — the technology transfer. Every year, we would tell Congress, “we’re going to spend X dollars to transfer these kinds of technologies, in general,” and then every year you figure that out as technologies are maturing and are ready to transition. That’s how I see it becoming faster.”
27. Matthew Steckman. Head of Government Affairs, Anduril Industries. He wrote: “Both sides feel defeated by the repeated refrain, “Let’s try and get this into the next budget process so we get the money in the next 3–5 years?”… The government should have many in-year options to move $1–10 million to new starts, several in-year options to move $10–100 million for scaling successful small programs, and select $100+ million options to move quickly against urgent capabilities that need to be fielded immediately.”
28. Rep. Mac Thornberry. Ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. He said in a conversation at the Brookings Institution: “I can’t tell you how many companies don’t have the resources of Microsoft and Amazon. They’ll win an award, have something cool, then there’s the proverbial valley of death where funding dries up until it is taken up with a program of record and they don’t have the resources to keep the people and production lines going. This is something we’ve talk a lot about this year — having small to mid-sized companies fill in the gaps — but it requires flexibility of funding, and I hope the appropriators will see the wisdom of that.”
29. Pablo Carillo. Former chief of staff to Sen. John McCain. He said: “Another way to thinking about this structural impediment we’re talking about in terms of the budget process is to think about how could we address it… You almost need — I don’t want to say slush fund — but some rapid innovation fund that’s been made available to program executive officers or program managers that can allow them to fail fast in connection with their procurement decisions related to emerging technology.”
30. Michele Flournoy. Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Defense News article based on January 15, 2019 hearing. “One problem is that innovative commercial firms that net DoD development funding will often wait in a “valley of death” for the DoD’s production decision. Flournoy suggested a bridge fund for such firms―in competitive areas like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing―as a way to stave off pressure from their investors to walk away from the department rather than wait.”
31. Chris Brose. Former SASC staff director and Anduril executive. Speaking to Congress on February 5, 2020. “I think the real challenge is going to be, Congress always wants to know how the Department is spending its money – and you’re entitled to that. I think we have gone too far as a nation tying the hands of the Department. I think greater flexibility for experimentation in current fiscal year is vital. I can’t tell you the number of instances in my time since leaving the SASC where someone in government says, “you’re doing really interesting stuff, I’d love to bring you in and do this, but I don’t have any money. I can POM for you two years from now.” It’s like, you’ve got billions of dollars. You say this is important. Two years from now? I might not exist.”
32. Henry Mintzberg. Management scholar: ” As management scholar Henry Mintzberg explains, PPBS and similar planning models suffer from what he calls the three fallacies of planning: (1) the “fallacy of predetermination,” which assumes that the future operating environment will comply with previously made plans; (2) the “fallacy of detachment,” which assumes that strategic formulation and implementation can be divorced from one another; and (3) the “fallacy of formalization,” which assumes that procedure can replace judgment when making strategy. But, as Mintzberg argues, the future environment rarely conforms to forecasts; formulation and implementation of plans are necessarily intertwined; and overemphasis on formal procedure eliminates creativity.”
33. Bob Work. Co-Chair of the National Security Commission on AI testimony to the HASC: “We have to come together also to reform the Planning Programming Budgeting and Execution process.”
34. David Packard. Founder of HP and former DepSecDef. Speaking at a 1972 appropriations hearing, Mar. 18, 1971: “By incorporation of this process [fixed budget ceilings] we feel that each aircraft design team can be supported for about $25 million per year and that we would obtain from each team two prototype models about every 3-4 years.”
35. Navy Marine Corps Acquisition Review Committee. Volume 1, Office of the Secretary of the Navy, January, 1975. “The fundamental feature of the Navy’s method of funding its laboratories derives from its method of presenting and justifying its budget to OSD and the Congress, i.e., in terms of RDT&E work to be accomplished, not in terms of organizations to be supported. This philosophy extends to the technology base work as well as through the engineering projects. Thus, in theory, no Navy laboratory is assured any funding, and each year it must sell the services of its entire work force.”
36. Elliot Converse III. Historian. “Rearming for the Cold War: 1945-1960.” “An important source of technical service autonomy lay in the nature and method of appropriation of the Army’s budget. Until FY 1952, Congress appropriated funds, not in bulk to the secretary of the Army, but in chunks to the service’s major organizational elements.”
37. Hawk Carlyle: Retired General and NDIA President at a Hudson Institute event: “How you design, how you build these systems has to begin with — and you know everybody’s brought it up but we’ll say it one more time — we’re in a 60s era McNamara PPBE process, planning program budgeting execution, that is just absolutely unacceptable.”
38. Trae Stephens: Founders Fund and Anduril board. Said at a Defense News roundtable: “If you can’t figure out this out-of-cycle funding for companies, then you’re just going to get stuck in this multiyear budgeting process that, due to it’s very nature is biased toward the integrators that have been playing the game long term.”
39. William Roper. Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. Quoted in Breaking Defense: “The way that the Air Force and now Space Force put their budget submissions into Congress, it puts all of the programs into individual program elements and that’s like locking each program into a little financial prison.” And here at an Ask Me Anything webinar: “The hardest thing about innovation — everything we want to do — it starts with where we’re going to find the money. And I hate the fact that the budget that we build is for two years in the future — as if we’re that smart to know what we’re going to be doing two years from today. More flexibility for doing in-year changes would mean a lot for making the Air Force more agile.”
40. Lt. Gen. Michael Williamson. Army’s top uniformed acquisition official. “Let’s imagine I’m moving through the process to buy a combat vehicle or a tactical truck. If industry or our own applied research comes up with a new transmission that can reduce our fuel consumption by 50 percent, it will be another year before I can flex that program to incorporate the new technology because of the way we identify our funding lines. If I have some flexibility, I can use the things we’re already doing through open systems architecture to at least start the process to plug that new transmission in now.” The article narrates, “Funding flexibility was a common theme among the witnesses from all three military departments, since under the current process, it takes DoD a full year to prepare a budget, another year to argue the spending plan’s merits before Congress and another year to actually expend the money once funds are appropriated into extremely rigid buckets.”
41. Todd Harrison. Director of Defense Budget Analysis and the director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS. He said: “You can speed up all this acquisition stuff as much as you want, but we still have a budget process where you’ve got to prepare your budget request about two years in advance of when you’re going to use it. So if you’ve got a really cool idea of something we should do today, then we can put together a budget proposal and in about two years you might have funding appropriated to start; just to start. What that does is drive us into systems acquisition, platform acquisition, when acquiring a platform is not always the right solution.”
42. Linda Lourie. Associate General Counsel for Acquisition & Logistics. She said: “The problem when I was at DIU is that we would work with a DOD component who would say “I love that tech, I need that tech, but when I wrote my budget — when I did my POM three years ago, I didn’t know I was going to see what I’m seeing.” Secretary [Ash] Carter was visionary in cracking the code out in Silicon Valley, in demystifying DOD to the Valley, of demystifying the Valley to the components, but the last piece of that puzzle has to be the budget cycle, because you don’t know what you’re going to love three years from now when you have to put your budget requests in today.”
43. Defense Innovation Board. Software Acquisition & Practices Study. “Replace the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPB&E) process, and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) with a portfolio management approach to software programs, assigned to “PEO Digital” or an equivalent office in each Service that uses direct identification of warfighter needs to decide on allocation priorities.”
44. Bryan Clark, Dan Patt, Harrison Schramm. In Mosaic Warfare: Exploiting Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems to Implement Decision-Centric Operations: “Implementing decision-centric warfare depends on the flexible combination of disparate weapon systems. With the current programming and budgeting system, spending cannot be organized such that portfolios of platforms, combat systems, sensors, and weapons are developed and fielded in a harmonized way… To enable decision-centric warfare, a portion of the defense budget should be aligned around important missions, such as defeating air defenses, strike, or ASW.”
45. Heidi Brockmann Demarest. Professor and author. She wrote: “Aggregate agency budgets are steady, predictable, and adhere closely to the theory of incrementalism, experiencing small changes from year to year during the congressional budget review process. But funding data from the Army’s procurement and research and development accounts over six fiscal years demonstrate that individual program budget outcomes are often highly volatile and unpredictable, not incremental.”
46. Col. Robert Morig (ret.). Writing in Defense ARJ: “It is this author’s opinion that funding stability in the real world environment where changing requirements, technologies, and program funding are the norm to meet warfighting needs is most likely a myth. It cannot occur without some major change in the PPBE and Congressional Enactment processes, both of which are unlikely.”
47. Adam Furtado. Director of Kessel Run. In a C4ISR article: “Furtado said there is difficulty navigating how to prove Kessel Run’s budget to Congress, because traditionally organizations argue their budges based on promised deliverables that are needed. It’s difficult to predict how much something is going to cost because the projects Kessel Run is working on evolve each day, Furtado said.”
48. Defense Science Board. 2005 study, Transformation: A Progress Assessment: “The principal resource allocation process (Program Planning Budgeting and Execution (PPBE)) is rigid and unresponsive—out of sync with the needs of Transformation.
    • Not mission, priority driven or agile (allows only limited budget reserves and reprogramming authority).
    • Does not focus on performance or have a timely feedback loop to impact subsequent budgetary decisions on programs.
    • Lacks the flexibility to respond to the near term needs of the COCOMs or to respond to capabilities needed for ongoing operations.
    • Focuses on capability gaps and ignores areas of excess capability (which could provide a source of funds).
    • Forces last minute, arbitrary choices and trade-offs.
    • Frequent funding changes caused by the last minute, arbitrary choices and trade-offs lead to the constant restructuring of programs which have a cost/schedule impacts.
    RECOMMENDED ACTIONS (Resource allocation is discussed in more detail in the Business Systems section of this report.) Develop a multi-year, mission-focused business plan that allocates resources and provides capability output metrics.
    • Allocate resources to mission purposes.
    • Constrain plans within achievable funding resource levels.
    • Measure progress against plan objectives/metrics.”
49. General Accountability Office. In a 2017 S&T report: “In total, it can take almost 2 years from the time a project is proposed in the POM to the time it is funded. In contrast, the companies we reviewed reported that they planned projects in the same year they were executed, which helped them quickly respond to leaps in technology development. S&T officials we met with stated that the 2-year project planning process
    reduces their ability to be as nimble as the companies with whom we met.”
50. Air Force Acquisition Reform Newsletter. Discussing the Program Element Consolidation Reinvention Team in 1998: “The multitude of PEs may limit the flexibility within the Service, Major Commands (MAJCOMs), and the PEO portfolios to respond to budget cuts, schedule changes, technical opportunities, or service needs.”
51. Donald Rumsfeld. Former Secretary of Defense. From a Sep 2001 DoD article: “It’s really a relic of the Cold War — a holdover from the days when it was possible to forecast threats for the next several years because we knew who would be threatening us for the next several decades,” Rumsfeld said. He called the PPBS one of the last vestiges of central planning left on Earth.”
52. General Mike Holmes. Former commander of Air Combat Command, at a Hudson Institute event: “What it really boils down to, and this is probably the single biggest challenge in this family of systems model, is every time I do a new variation — and I’m thinking specifically a new variation of platform, but frankly it could also be a new variation of mission systems which gets even messier but let’s just talk platforms — every time I do a new variation of the platform, new platform cannot equal new program.”
53. Frank Goral. Naval Postgraduate School. “The DSARC and PPBS decision making process within DoD.” He wrote in Dec. 1979: “Resource requirements for a new program are entered into the programming and budgeting portion of PPBS by means of the POM. Even though such a recommended “new start” does not become an approved SECDEF program by this process, it is still necessary to “line up” funds prior to SECDEF approval, because of the twenty-nine month delay between planning and budgeting built into the PPBS process.”
54. Richard DeLauer. Undersecretary for Research & Engineering. Testifying to Congress in 1981: “As a final step, we believe we can do a better job with our acquisition process by tying DSARC’s and the PPBS process more closely together… The two systems were not connected. The allocation of resources had no connection with the spending of the resources on programs. I think this may be No. 1 recommendation that the Carlucci review set forth. We will be tying the two systems together.”
55. Kenneth White. Army War College. “PPBS and Policy Analysis: Are They Really Incompatible?” He wrote in Mar. 1972: “PPBS is described as a Rube Goldberg-like mechanism which ingests great amounts, of painfully derived data but which produces very little.”
56. Adm. Hyman Rickover. Speaking to Congress in Dec. 1971: “Sen. Goldwater: One of your major problems, it seems to me, is that you are constantly working and worrying about next year’s money. Admiral Rickover: That’s right, sir.”
57. Chuck Spinney. PA&E analyst, in a written statement to Congress: “The situation is complicated by the fact that these program elements do not correspond to the traditional input-oriented appropriation categories used by Congress to raise money for the armed forces. In fact, a single program element in the FYDP is likely to include more than one appropriation category in its money stream. For example, a program element for a component of force structure, like F-15 Squadrons, could conceivably include the moneys from the R&D, Procurement, O&M, Milpers, and Milcon appropriations…We can think of the Defense Department as a living goal-seeking organism. The procedures of PPBS are the tools used by the collective brain to set goals by matching the organisms inner workings to the threats, opportunities, and constraints in its external environment. The FYDP, being the end product of that brains activities is therefore the essential source of financial management information that describes this matchup…. Consider, please, the dire implications of this breakdown [between matchup of FYDP plans and reality]: Without reliable information, there can be no confidence that the required matchup between the Defense organism and its environment has been or will be achieved.