The Pentagon’s chief weapon buyer is calling for Congress to enact a short-term stopgap funding measure as a stepping stone to passing a comprehensive appropriations bill.
Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said Sept. 7 that a three-month continuing resolution (CR) would best suit the Defense Department and that ideally the next administration will take office with an actual defense spending bill in place. Congress is currently debating whether to enact a three- or six-month CR.
“I’m hoping that saner heads will prevail and we will get three months, in which case we can then get an actual appropriation,” Kendall said at the Common Defense conference in Washington, D.C. “That’s what we need.”
Since sequestration summarily slashed 10 percent off the Defense Department topline in 2013, Congress has each year reached some compromise defense spending level that is above the mandatory budget caps. This has been done primarily through continuing resolutions that punt an actual appropriations bill for six months, which is again expected this year.
More menacing for the Defense Department is the specter of sequestration, which according to law will return in 2018 if Congress and the next administration fail to reach a compromise on federal defense and non-defense spending and repeal the 2011 Budget Control Act. When the current two-year budget deal expires, sequestration again sets funding caps on the Defense Department and could threaten investment in long-term modernization programs, Kendall said.
“The next administration will have to confront what to do about that, will have to work with Congress to try to come up with some solution,” Kendall said. “Sequestration, for the next few years through [20]21 will set the floor for the debate, unless we do something about it.”
Federal budget guru Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the best-case scenario is the next administration finds a four-year budget deal that covers the four remaining years of BCA caps. The Defense Department already is planning for $113 billion more than the caps allow.
“This is my best, most optimistic scenario here,” he said.
Even as it heads into lame-duck territory, the Pentagon has laid down investments in technologies and development programs in the hope that their momentum and funding will continue under the next administration.
Under Kendall, the Defense Department’s research and development accounts – risk reduction before full-scale development for production – have seen a healthy infusion of cash. Funding for actual production of systems has been drained to sew those seeds, he said.
“That’s where we have put our money,” he said. “It’s the right place to put the money first. What we don’t have in the five-year plan right now is the follow-on funds to take those demonstration efforts and make them into real programs and then – even more expensive – to actually produce them and put them in the hands of our war fighters.”
Kendall defended the decision to invest heavily in research and development while kicking the can on funding production of some major systems. The timeline for many modernization programs is driven not by available funding but by the age and technological relevance of legacy systems relative to the global threat environment, he said.
“It’s still the right thing to do. It moves technology forward. It is good for our industrial base, collectively. It keeps our intellectual capital current and actively engaged on cutting-edge things and it buys us options for future investments.”
Whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, the next president will be tasked with ushering multi-billion-dollar nuclear recapitalization programs through uncertain federal budgets. Development programs are underway for the B-21 strategic bomber, the ground-based strategic deterrent that will replace the nation’s ICBMs and the Ohio-class nuclear submarine. But the real bills for production of all three platforms will come due around fiscal 2021-2022, Kendall said.