Follow us on social

Screen-shot-2022-10-20-at-1.37.15-pm

Backdoor earmarks make everyone smile (except the taxpayer)

Don't look at the topline $773 billion military budget proposal. Congress is padding it as we speak, particularly in the less noticed 'R&D' column.

Analysis | Military Industrial Complex

It’s not news to any budget watchers that the Pentagon’s massive topline can camouflage a ton of mischief and deal-making during the annual congressional budget process. 

Lawmakers get at least four bites of the apple to work their will on how the Fiscal Year 2023 topline of roughly $773 billion is allocated. That’s the job of Congress, no dispute. But a key area to watch for budget shenanigans is in Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) and the myriad requests coming in from each of the military services and Special Forces Command. 

RDT&E is a target-rich environment for contractors looking to find a member of Congress willing to insert a few million (or more) dollars for a relatively small research program in their district. But once a program has some RDT&E money, it’s easy to keep the money ball rolling. And, eventually, that contractor will be back to the lawmaker, looking for the program to transition from research into procurement, where the really big money lies.

And that’s one way the Pentagon ends up buying something it never asked for in the first place. We call it backdoor earmarking.

RDT&E budgets aren’t huge in comparison to procurement, operations, and maintenance. But this is the Pentagon, so we’re still talking billions of dollars. The request for the Army in Fiscal Year 2023 was $13.7 billion. The Navy and Marine Corps' combined request was $24 billion in R&D. The Air Force was $33.4 billion. And the Space Force was $15.8 billion— a big percentage of its overall budget of $24.5 billion.

Of course, lawmaker changes to RDT&E programs are both “give” and “take.” There is a fair amount of “not this, but that” horse trading as the budget moves through the wickets on Capitol Hill. 

My organization, Taxpayers for Common Sense, has done the spade work and can now lay out the “program increases” made by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) to the research and development portion of the FY23 Pentagon budget request.

The HASC was particularly aggressive in changes to the Army RDT&E request. There were 125 individual “program increases” directed to Army budget lines. Several lines received six different program increases. For instance: “Lethality Technology” received six increases worth a combined $95 million. The HASC concentrated its overall value of increases for the Army in two particular lines: “Biotechnology for Materials — Applied Research” and “Night Vision Systems Advance Development.” In both cases, the entire $150 million bump is for a single program.

The Navy and Marine Corps combined received a little more than half the Army’s number of individual program increases — 79 of them — in the HASC bill. “Force Protection Applied Research” (a line that also received the greatest number of increases in last year’s Omnibus Appropriations bill, detailed here) had eight separate program increases with a total value of $61.5 million. Most of the attention went to the next generation ballistic missile submarine, with the program receiving an additional $197.4 million, the vast majority of which went to “Accelerated Design.”

The HASC directed 69 program increases in Air Force RDT&E. The greatest number of increases to a single line was eight separate programs added to “Dominant Information Sciences and Methods,” with a total value of $94 million. For the second year in row, the “Advanced Engine Development” line received the greatest meddling with $150 million for “AETP” (an alternate engine program).  Look for that to rise because, when all was said and done in last year’s Omnibus appropriation for the Pentagon, AETP ended up with a whopping $460 million.

The new Space Force is still being carved out of the Air Force, and line items are transferring to Space Force over time. The HASC directs 17 Space Force program increases — four in “Space Technology” — with a total value of $35.1 million. “Tactically Responsive Launch” ends up with the greatest net increase for a single line of $100 million. And “Classified Programs” gets the largest single program increase of $308 million for “INDOPACOM (Indo-Pacific Command) Space Control.”

The dryly named “Defense-wide” accounts, which includes entities ranging from Special Forces to the Commissary system, got a lot of tinkering from the HASC with 146 program increases. “Defense-wide Manufacturing Science and Technology Program” alone was given 14 programs it didn’t ask for. It also had the largest single program increase —$500 million for “Biotechnology Manufacturing Institutes.” Altogether, this catch-all research line received a net increase of slightly more than $1 BILLION! (Overall, R&D for the Defense-wide accounts was increased $4.4 billion above the $32 billion budget request.)

As we said, this is just the first bite of the apple. We’ve been reading the details of each major committee action and will be detailing similar increases by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Negotiations” between the two chambers, as they hammer out the differences between two versions of the same bill, rarely lead to any kind of meeting in the middle these days. Instead, they tend to be more: “We’ll agree to your increases if you’ll agree to ours.”

Most of the math is addition; subtraction never seems to be on the agenda.


(Chiari VFX/Shutterstock)
Analysis | Military Industrial Complex
Daniel Noboa, Xi Jinping
Top photo credit: Beijing, China.- In the photos, Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and his Ecuadorian counterpart, Daniel Noboa (left), during a meeting in the Great Hall of the People, the venue for the main protocol events of the Chinese government on June 26, 2025 (Isaac Castillo/Pool / Latin America News Agency via Reuters Connect)

Why Ecuador went straight to China for relief

Latin America

Marco Rubio is visiting Mexico and Ecuador this week, his third visit as Secretary of State to Latin America.

While his sojourn in Mexico is likely to grab the most headlines given all the attention the Trump administration has devoted to immigration and Mexican drug cartels, the one to Ecuador is primarily designed to “counter malign extra continental actors,” according to a State Department press release.The reference appears to be China, an increasingly important trading and investment partner for Ecuador.

keep readingShow less
US Capitol
Top image credit: Lucky-photographer via shutterstock.com

Why does peace cost a trillion dollars?

Washington Politics

As Congress returns from its summer recess, Washington’s attention is turning towards a possible government shutdown.

While much of the focus will be on a showdown between Senate Democrats and Donald Trump, a subplot is brewing as the House and Senate, led by Republicans but supported by far too many Democrats, fight over how big the Pentagon’s budget should be. The House voted to give Trump his requested trillion dollar budget, while the Senate is demanding $22 billion more.

keep readingShow less
Yemen Ahmed al-Rahawi
Top image credit: Funeral in Sana a for senior Houthi officials killed in Israeli strikes Honor guard hold up a portraits of Houthi government s the Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and other officials killed in Israeli airstrikes on Thursday, during a funeral ceremony at the Shaab Mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, 01 September 2025. IMAGO/ via REUTERS

Israel playing with fire in Yemen

Middle East

“The war has entered a new phase,” declared Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior official in Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, after Israeli jets streaked across the Arabian Peninsula to kill the group’s prime minister and a swathe of his cabinet in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.

The senior official from Ansar Allah, the movement commonly known as the Houthis, was not wrong. The strike, which Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz promised was “just the beginning,” signaled a fundamental shift in the cartography of a two-year war of attrition between the region’s most technologically advanced military and its most resilient guerrilla force.

The retaliation was swift, if militarily ineffective: missiles launched towards Israel disintegrated over Saudi Arabia. Internally, a paranoid crackdown ensued on perceived spies. Houthi security forces stormed the offices of the World Food Programme and UNICEF, detaining at least 11 U.N. personnel in a sweep immediately condemned by the U.N. Secretary General.

The catalyst for this confrontation was the war in Gaza, unleashed by Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, which provided the Houthis with the ideological fuel and political opportunity to transform themselves. Seizing the mantle of Palestinian solidarity — a cause their leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, frames as a “sacrifice in the cause of God Almighty ” — they graduated from a menacing regional actor into a global disruptor, launching missiles toward Israel just weeks after Hamas’s attacks and holding one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes hostage.

The chessboard was dangerously rearranged in May, when the Trump administration, eager for an off-ramp from a costly and ineffective air campaign, brokered a surprise truce with the Houthis. Mediated by Oman, the deal was simple: the U.S. would stop bombing Houthi targets, and the Houthis would stop attacking American ships. President Trump, in his characteristic style, claimed the Houthis had “capitulated” while also praising their “bravery.”

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.