As many as 50 Air Force programs would be delayed in fiscal year 2016 should Congress decide to pass a continuing resolution (CR) instead of a budget this year, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said Monday.

Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James

Under a CR, programs are funded at the same level they were during the previous fiscal year, meaning that a new start program where funding was scheduled to start in fiscal 2016 would not have the resources necessary to begin development.

“We estimate a rough order of magnitude that there might be as many as 50 programs, many of them smaller programs, but nonetheless 50 programs would fall under that category of a new start which could not be done under a full year CR,” she said.

Once Congress returns from recess in September, it will have less than a month to pass a budget before the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1. But, with the defense authorization bill still in conference and Democratic opposition to the GOP budget—which raises military spending but keeps all other discretionary accounts under spending caps—it’s unlikely lawmakers will be able to pass such legislation before the Sept. 30 deadline.

If funded at the president’s budget levels, the Defense Department stands to receive $24.9 billion more in fiscal 2016 than it did the previous year, or about a 4 percent increase.

“A full year CR would provide for our Air Force…even less money than the sequestration level budget would provide,” James said. “So all around that would be a bad deal, and we need to get the full up appropriation and the full up authorization passed at roughly the president’s budget level.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said a CR would also prevent the service from being able to buy as many aircraft in 2016 as originally planned.

“We do have quantity increases scheduled in ’16 in aircraft procurements like the KC-46, the F-35, the C-130 multi-year program and a few other things.  Those would go away under a year-long CR.  The quantity increases would not be allowable,” he said.

Additionally, the service would not be able to fund increases to its end strength if a yearlong CR is put in place, James said. The Air Force plans to boost end strength from 483,000 to 492,000 in fiscal 2016, including adding 4,000 active duty airmen to the force.

She added that she would fight against any further reductions to end strength, “but as I mentioned, we’d be significantly down in terms of our dollars of where we need to be, and so everything would have to be looked at.”

One of the Air Force’s top priorities, the Long Range Strike Bomber, would not be affected by a CR (Defense Daily, Aug. 26). A contract will be awarded “soon” to either Northrop Grumman [NOC] or a Lockheed Martin [LMT]-Boeing [BA] team, said James, who would not comment on rumors that an award had been pushed into October.  “We will do it when we are ready. The key thing is to make sure that we are doing it correctly.”