Pentagon budgeting shouldn’t look like this

The Pentagon budget request, like all budgets, reflects the priorities of those who write it. But in recent years, these priorities have increasingly been overruled in favor of explicitly lower-priority investments. Since fiscal 2017, Congress has required the military services and combatant commands to submit lists of low-priority projects that the Pentagon couldn’t fit into its budget request, which is up to $850 billion this year.

They call these listed items unfunded priorities, but Congress often funds them, frequently at the expense of actual priorities included in the Pentagon’s budget request. As Congress begins to craft the Pentagon budget for fiscal 2025, this year’s unfunded priority lists (UPLs) are already making their way into the budget at the expense of higher priorities.

The base text of the House National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would authorize an additional $355 million for counter-drone programs in response to the Army’s UPL. But to make room for these and many other additions to the budget while adhering to the budget caps agreed to last year, lawmakers cut funding from a wide range of line items, including $1 billion from the Army’s Procurement request, $240 million from the Army’s Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) account, and $420 million from the Army’s Operation and Maintenance account.

This explicitly counters the priorities of the military leaders who submitted these required lists.

When Army Chief of Staff General Randy George submitted the required UPL this year, he prefaced the list with a note stating, “the Army’s FY25 budget request maintains our alignment with the National Defense Strategy and our ability to conduct our warfighting mission,” and requested “that these unfunded priorities not displace anything on the Army’s FY25 PB [President’s Budget] request.”

Similarly, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti prefaced the Navy’s required UPL by underscoring that “these unfunded items do not take priority over the FY 2025 President’s Budget and I urge Congress not to reduce the FY 2025 budget submission to support these unfunded items.”

None of this is to say that counter-drone programs shouldn’t be funded; in fact, the Army requested about $470 million for counter-drone programs in the base budget request. It is Congress’s prerogative to make changes to the president’s budget request, and some of the programs facing cuts, like the F-35, have certainly earned them.

But when the military’s civilian leaders assessed the budget holistically, they decided on funding levels that accounted for the needs of the entire military. UPLs don’t take that holistic approach. Instead, they serve as a means for lawmakers to take credit for funding the shinier, highly politicized portions of the Pentagon budget like projects requested by Indo-Pacific Command, while cutting hundreds of millions from the nuts and bolts of the budget, such as the Operation and Maintenance accounts.

Making matters worse, the Pentagon is all too familiar with this dynamic, leading some to wonder whether the Pentagon deliberately leaves some of its real priorities out of the budget in hopes that Congress will step in to fund them.

The Pentagon budget process shouldn’t be an all-you-can-eat buffet line for lawmakers, nor should it encourage the Pentagon to craft a budget based on gambles about which projects Congress might fund through UPLs.

Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) tried to address this issue when the House Armed Services Committee marked up the NDAA last week, offering an amendment that would have simply repealed the requirement for these lists. This would be a return to the pre-2017 status quo when military service branch leaders and combatant commanders could submit UPLs at their discretion.

It would go a long way in reining in the unnecessary spending generated by these lists while still leaving military leaders with the option to seek funding for items they view as truly indispensable. Unfortunately, the committee rejected the amendment.

If lawmakers are truly committed to meeting the real priorities of the Pentagon and the American people, not just this year but in the years to come, we need to get our nation’s debt under control. The national debt is now over $34.5 trillion and growing. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that in 2024, we’ll be spending more on interest payments to service our nation’s debt than on the military. That’s an enormous amount of money that isn’t going to national security or domestic spending needs. It’s just paying interest on the nation’s credit card.

Shunning unnecessary spending and adhering to budget caps are essential to reining in the debt, and repealing the requirement for UPLs would help on both fronts. As the Senate Armed Services Committee prepares to take up the NDAA in June, the committee should do what the House couldn’t and put an end to the harmful UPL requirement.

Gabe Murphy is a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for transparency and calling out wasteful spending.