More than $56 billion of the Army’s fiscal year 2015 budget request–46 percent–falls under the military personnel account, and if Congress rejects the Pentagon’s force structure drawdown and compensation reform plans, that percentage could grow rapidly and edge out procurement and research and development accounts, a top Army official said Thursday.
Of the $120.5 billion the Army asked for, $42 billion would go to operations and maintenance, $13.5 billion to procurement and $6.6 billion for research, development, test and evaluation, Lt. Gen. Joseph Martz, military deputy for budget to the assistant secretary of the Army for financial management and comptroller, said at an Association of the United States Army breakfast in Arlington, Va. The budget request as a whole, though, is delicately balanced on Congress allowing certain cost-savings proposals to go through, including slowing the growth of pay increases and reforms to Tricare.
Asked if the Army prepared a second budget scenario in case Congress rejects the pay and compensation changes, Martz replied, “there’s a point in time where you can’t properly do two, and that is because you want to get it right. If resources are coming down, you need the time and the analysis” to make smart decisions after considering all the right factors, he said.
Reacting to Congress altering the budget request would not be as easy as just cutting a program or shifting around some training money, he said. “This is about the connective tissue. Everybody says, well you can just move this–it’s not like taking a cup of water out of a bathtub where everything’s the same, it’s all water. This is about, if I take this money from here, what else does it touch?”
Instead of creating a formal alternate budget, Martz told Defense Daily after the presentation that the Army prepared a list of priorities at the same time the budget request made its way to the chief of staff and the secretary. Before the top leaders approved the budget request, they were able to view it with this list of what would be first on the chopping block if any of the cost-savers were rejected by lawmakers.
Now, Martz said, the decision is out of the Army’s hands. Programmers and budgeters are already working on the FY ’16 budget request, due to top Army leadership by June 1, and all they can do for FY ’15 is answer questions from Capitol Hill as the House and Senate begin their markup process next month.