Continuing resolutions bind the Pentagon.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: Budget Matters

* If lawmakers continue funding the government through continuing resolutions, it would be difficult for the Defense Department to recover, according to a leading independent budget analyst.

"I don't anticipate this [recently passed] CR alone would be very disruptive," said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C. think tank. "Program managers are already prepared for this. Now if this continuing resolution gets extended, then you start to have problems for programs because there is less and less of the year left for them to recover and actually execute what they had planned in 2016."

Continuing resolutions are problematic for the Defense Department because they prohibit new programs from starting and don't allow for an increase in production rates for ongoing programs. The current one would keep the government funded through Dec. 11.

"If they extend this much longer ... then you have to start looking at Congress giving DoD exceptions" to these restrictions, as well as permission to move money around between accounts, Harrison said.

If a full-year continuing resolution is passed, it's "almost certain" that Congress would give the Defense Department the exceptions it requested for high priority acquisition programs.

However, if another short-term CR gets approved before the December deadline, "it's iffy" as to whether lawmakers would grant the requests at that time, he said.

Congress could "stumble along from short-term CR to short-term CR all the way through the year and maybe not pass the exceptions until late in the [fiscal] year," he said.

Receiving special program allowances would not fully solve the Pentagon's budget problems because they wouldn't increase the military's topline. Officials have been sounding the alarm. "A long-term continuing resolution is merely sequester-level funding under another name," Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said at a recent aerospace conference...