For the Pentagon, the question is not whether programs will have to be delayed if a yearlong continuing resolution is enacted for fiscal year 2016, it’s how many and which ones. The department is already looking at options, Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top acquisition executive, said on Tuesday.
Photo: Boeing
“I’ve given the deputy secretary a list of major commitments we’d be making in FY 16 with some thoughts on which ones we should defer just because of the uncertainty. I’m not going to discuss what’s on that list, but some of the things we’ve been planning are going to have to be deferred,” he said during a panel presentation hosted by Defense One. “If we make commitments and then end up with less money than we anticipate, we don’t want to be in the position of having to terminate those.”
A yearlong continuing resolution would provide roughly the same amount of money as a sequestration level budget, a sum that is about $38 billion lower than the president’s 2016 request. Kendall predicted that a greater proportion of cuts will be made to acquisition because the department would likely try to funds for readiness and current operations.
During the panel, service acquisition executives also rang alarm bells about the toll a yearlong continuing resolution would take on weapons programs.
More than 400 Army programs would be impacted, and major programs will not be immune to the negative effects, said Heidi Shyu, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics, and technology.
“We won’t be able to procure the quantities that we planned,” she said. For example, the Army will only be able to buy about half of the AH-64E Apache helicopters it planned to buy this year. “That’s jobs at stake because of the impact of sequestration.”
A CR would also affect the armored multipurpose vehicle program (AMPV) to replace armored brigade combat team’s Vietnam-era M113s. The Army will not be able to ramp up development of that vehicle, to be built by BAE Systems, if it only has the same level of funding as 2015, she said.
The Navy is still recovering from the 2013 sequestration cuts, which led to a backlog of work at aviation depots, canceled ship maintenance and slowed down programs, said Sean Stackley, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition . A yearlong CR would have an additional $11 billion impact, furthering worsening the service’s predicament.
It would hold up new-start programs such as procurement of aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN-80), the refueling and complex overhaul of the USS George Washington (CVN-73) and the T-AO(X) oiler replacement, he said.
“The 2013 experience which was relatively minor compared to what we’re staring out in 2016,” he said. “The uncertainty of not knowing what your budget will be will put you in shackles in terms of executing in the course of a year.”