The House panel with responsibility for funding the Pentagon on Tuesday released its proposed defense budget, providing more than $1.3 billion to the Defense Department’s unit charged with helping to accelerate the adoption of commercial technology.
The proposal by the House Appropriations Defense (HAC-D) Subcommittee for fiscal year 2025 far exceeds DoD’s $109.6 million request for the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). For FY ’24, DoD sought $104.7 million and Congress ultimately appropriated $946.5 million for the unit.
For FY ’25, HAC-D’s proposed DIU funding includes $200 million that would be used by U.S. Combatant Commands to rapidly acquire technology for use by warfighters, an undisclosed funding increase for fielding technologies, and more flexibility for DIU’s fielding efforts “in exchange for greater transparency with Congress,” says a summary of the panel’s bill. The HAC-D will mark up its bill on Wednesday and the full appropriations committee is slated to markup the measure next Thursday.
The subcommittee was the driving force behind the huge plus-up to the DIU budget in FY ’24, recommending just over $1 billion in their version of the spending bill as Senate appropriators only added $2.5 million to the budget request.
Of the nearly $950 million provided DIU in the final FY ’24 Defense Appropriations Act, $589.4 million is for fielding technologies and $220 million for COCOM support. There is also funding for long-endurance unmanned surface vessels, countering small drones, autonomous vertical take-off and landing logistics aircraft, and artificial intelligence applications (Defense Daily, March 21).
Matt MacGregor, a self-described acquisition nerd who worked for the Air Force, MITRE Corp., and is now a fellow with the Acquisition Innovation Research Center, an applied academic research arm of DoD, applauded the HAC-D’s proposed funding increase for DIU but is a proponent of spending even more on systems developed by non-traditional defense contractors.
“I think we should be spending about 5 percent of our investment budget on non-traditional systems,” he told Defense Daily. “That’s about $40B[illion]…so this is a step but a small one.”
MacGregor said he is not a fan of how the FY ’24 Defense Appropriations Bill carves out specific pots of funding for DIU to spend on UAS, counter-UAS, and other items.
The HAC-D in a report accompanying its version of the FY ’24 spending bill called its strategy segmenting DIU funding into different program areas a “hedge portfolio” that could help COCOMs with their operational challenges.
DIU should have more options, MacGregor said.
“I think if you want this to be a real hedge, you need to leave more discretion to DIU,” he said.
The HAC-D also is proposing $400 million for the Pentagon’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) program, which is managed by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (R&E) to speed up the fielding of new technologies to warfighters. Congress appropriated $300 million for APFIT in FY ’24 and the R&E office has already awarded at least $233 million in contracts with those funds (Defense Daily, April 18).
MacGregor said he would like an APFIT budget of at least $1 billion for the R&E office to acquire “non-traditional systems that the [military] services aren’t prioritizing in their own budgets.”