Air Force Hopes to Jettison Pass-Through Budget.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: BUDGET MATTERS

The Air Force has long been saddled with accounts that fund other organizations' projects, but officials and other supporters are pushing to change that.

Critics of the "pass-through" budget, which on paper goes to the Air Force but actually pays for intelligence agency assets, say it hurts the service by making its coffers appear larger.

"It makes it look like the Department of the Air Force is getting more money than it actually is," Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, said during the Air Force's Association Virtual Air, Space and Cyber Conference. "It obscures debate about defense spending. And it gets into this idea of how hard it is to compare [funding] across services."

Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, head of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said there is a persistent myth that the Air Force is funded roughly equally with the other service departments, but a much smaller percentage of the defense budget goes toward Air Force capabilities and modernization. That isn't enough to achieve the airpower capacity the nation needs, he argued.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said $38 billion of the $207 billion Air Force budget request for 2021 is pass-through funding. "Most people in Congress don't realize that."

Bacon has introduced the Air Force Budget Transparency Act, which would break out that funding and make it part of the Defense-wide budget.

Lawmakers have important decisions to make about resource allocation and military modernization, he noted.

"To make those decisions, you've got to know what we're actually spending. And today that fact is obscured to most because of this pass-through budget," he said.

Richard McConn, CEO and founder of M International Inc...