Congress is crying wolf again on the Pentagon budget

As Congress zeroes in on a continuing resolution to keep the government funded beyond the end of the 2024 fiscal year on September 30, it’s effectively punting on a host of questions lawmakers would rather not weigh in on ahead of the November 5 election.

Chief among them is whether or not to advance the Senate Appropriations Committee’s plan to include some $34.5 billion in emergency spending in the final budget, including $21 billion for the Pentagon and $13.5 billion for domestic programs.

On the Pentagon side of this “emergency” cash infusion, which led to the domestic emergency spending in a nominal nod to parity, a cursory look at some of the emergency increases shows that many are not in fact responding to real emergencies. Rather, as the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee Susan Collins (R-Maine) readily admitted in her description of the funding, the $21 billion “will be emergency funding so it will not break the (spending) caps” agreed to last year. Those caps limit spending to one percent above FY2024 levels.

In a recently updated database of congressional Pentagon budget increases, Taxpayers for Common Sense revealed that Senate appropriators proposed 47 emergency program increases for procurement and 16 emergency increases for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E), at a proposed cost to taxpayers of $9.1 billion and $2.9 billion, respectively.

On the procurement side, $3.3 million for “Industrial base facilitization,” $20 million for “Silicon carbide device manufacturing,” and $87.6 million for “Energy storage and batteries,” to name a few examples, hardly seem to respond to unforeseen emergencies. Neither does $650 million for “Miscellaneous equipment” in the National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account, a National Guard slush fund that Congress funds year after year even though the Pentagon omits the program from its request year after year.

Then there’s the nearly $3 billion for 16 RDT&E program increases labeled as emergency funding. Without even looking at the individual increases, we can safely say that none of this funding is responding to legitimate emergencies, because RDT&E accounts are about supporting the fielding of new equipment down the road, not deploying equipment into the field immediately (which is achieved through procurement). The most glaring illustration of this is the $500 million classified increase to the Navy’s Next Generation Fighter program, which won’t field planes until the 2030s at the earliest. In fact, with the Air Force rethinking plans for its next-generation fighter, it’s fair to ask whether the Navy’s next-generation fighter is facing a similar reckoning, and whether current plans for the fighter are likely to change, if they move forward at all.

An important backdrop to all of this emergency funding is the fact that military service leaders, in their annual submissions of congressionally required unfunded priority lists (UPLs), often insist that the Pentagon’s budget request is sufficient to meet our national security needs. For example, Army General Randy George wrote in his FY2025 UPL that “The Army’s FY25 budget request maintains our alignment with the National Defense Strategy and our ability to conduct our warfighting mission.”

So, when appropriators added eight emergency program increases for Army procurement at a proposed cost of $1.7 billion, they did so with the knowledge that the Army said it didn’t need that funding to conduct its warfighting mission.

Congress appropriating emergency funding for non-emergencies is nothing new, but it’s notable that this year they didn’t even bother to put it in a separate emergency supplemental spending bill. Instead, they just added it directly into the Pentagon’s base budget bill.

The fundamental problem with expanding this bad budgeting practice is well known to children across the nation: if you keep crying wolf, when a wolf actually shows up, it might be harder to effectively respond. And the wolves are coming. Interest payments on our national debt, driven in no small part by Pentagon spending that’s ballooned nearly 50 percent adjusted for inflation since the turn of the century, could surpass military spending this year, depending on whether the final bill adheres to budget caps or not. That’s $870,000,000,000 taxpayers will pay just in interest.

At the same time, military modernization plans that even Pentagon leadership has described as unsustainable mean that Congress will either have to cut back on those plans or incur even more debt, which will in turn create more budgetary constraints down the road. Budgeting for national security in this environment necessitates fiscal discipline and strategic prioritization, not unconstrained spending dressed up as an emergency.

Whenever lawmakers get around to finalizing the Pentagon budget, they should ensure it adheres to the budget caps agreed to last year and save the emergency funding for real emergencies.