Congress Needs to Build on its Budget Successes.

• Author: Larsen, Christian
• Position: NDIA Policy Points

Federal agencies need time and well-defined funding levels in the near- to mid-term to produce strategically sound budgets for America.

Following the 2011 failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to achieve consensus on a comprehensive debt reduction plan, the resulting budget sequestration imposed instability in topline budgets across the federal government. This forced agencies into a series of stopgap, short-term planning exercises, with a particularly negative impact on the Defense Department.

In 2018, Congress worked with the administration to pass a two-year Bipartisan Budget Act, raising defense and domestic spending caps to deliver a short-term, stable, predictable foundation for budget formulation. Bipartisan agreement to raise the topline budget caps imposed by sequestration allowed congressional leadership to achieve a significant legislative victory when the president signed the fiscal year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act in August.

Additionally, the Senate has passed nine of 12 required funding measures, including a "mini-bus" package of Defense and Labor-Health and Human Servies-Education appropriations bills that is currently awaiting reconciliation with the Defense stand-alone bill passed by the House.

These victories are significant both in terms of speed and process: Congress passed authorization bills and may pass appropriations bills prior to the start of fiscal year 2019 because stakeholders agreed on funding levels and executed normal order processes to allocate resources against priorities. Congress needs to build on this success by consistently establishing well-defined funding levels enabling federal agencies to plan, develop and execute effective budgets.

This year offered a long-awaited return to the Senate's normal order, providing short-term clarity and stability to the Defense Department's programmers and financial managers' long-term budget projections. A sobering statistic: the last time a president signed a defense authorization bill prior to the start of a fiscal year was in 1996 for the fiscal year 1997 NDAA.

In the worst years, multiple continuing resolutions and government shutdowns hollowed readiness and destabilized major weapons systems programs, impacting current operations and future capabilities. For more than four decades, Congress fell short of enacting budgets in a timely manner, to the detriment of the systems and support required by America's warfighters.

Budgeting...