Senators want to infect other agencies with 'unfunded' wish lists

Last week, Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) introduced legislation, along with an identical amendment to the Pentagon policy bill, to require the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to submit so-called “unfunded priority lists” (UPLs) to Congress.

In a press release announcing the effort, they argue the requirement “recognizes the State Department and USAID’s roles as key national security agencies,” and would provide “a clearer picture to Congress of where we need to allocate resources to ensure we can effectively respond to emerging threats and global challenges.”

While diplomacy and foreign aid are absolutely essential to national security, and are arguably undervalued as such in the budget, expanding a practice that fuels the very overemphasis on military spending these lawmakers aim to address is the wrong approach.

Unfunded priorities are just that — unfunded, meaning lower priority than everything that was funded in the president’s budget request. And while it is the prerogative and responsibility of Congress to assess, adjust, and approve the nation’s budget, unfunded priorities undercut the holistic approach to budgeting enshrined in the normal budget process.

Congress started requiring the military and several other national security agencies to submit unfunded priority lists to Congress in 2017, a response to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s efforts to rein in the practice.

In the years that followed, lawmakers have used these unfunded priority lists to argue that the Pentagon is woefully underfunded. That argument is at odds with the reality that military spending has grown nearly 50 percent adjusted for inflation since the turn of the century.

It’s also at odds with military service leaders, who often preface these lists with assurances that the president’s budget is sufficient. As Army Chief of Staff General Randy George put it in his FY2025 UPL, “the Army’s FY25 budget request maintains our alignment with the National Defense Strategy and our ability to conduct our warfighting mission.”

Nonetheless, the growth of the unfunded priority lists this year was a central argument in Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R-Miss.) case for adding $55 billion to the Pentagon budget. And Senate appropriators just answered this call to arms with a $21 billion hike to the Pentagon budget, an open rebellion against budget caps agreed to just last year.

Lawmakers also occasionally fund UPLs by cutting items that were included in the base budget — against the express wishes of the military service leaders who submit these lists. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti for example emphasized in the Navy’s UPL that “these unfunded items do not take priority over the FY 2025 President’s Budget and I urge Congress not to reduce the FY 2025 budget submission to support these unfunded items.”

Congress routinely ignores these requests, and this year is no different.

The Pentagon’s civilian leadership has also taken issue with UPLs. Last year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin expressed his support for repealing the requirement for these lists. Explaining the Pentagon’s opposition, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord argued that “The current statutory practice of having multiple individual senior leaders submit priorities for additional funding absent the benefit of weighing costs and benefits across the department is not an effective way to illuminate our top joint priorities.” The same logic would hold true for State and USAID.

Lawmakers, particularly those on the foreign relations committees like Kaine and Young, have plenty of opportunities to hear from State and USAID officials as they weigh the president’s budget request and look for opportunities to boost our national investments in these critical agencies. So do lawmakers on the armed services and appropriations committees with respect to the Pentagon budget.

Rather than expanding the practice of budgeting for national security by cherry-picking unfunded projects at the expense of real priorities, Congress should repeal these requirements and adopt a more measured, holistic approach to meeting our national security needs.

Thankfully Senator Warren (D-Mass.) is working to do just that with her own bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was co-sponsored by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). When Congress gets around to finalizing the NDAA, it should support this straightforward amendment to repeal the UPL requirements and reject efforts, however well intentioned, that would expand the malign impacts of unfunded priority lists.