A Little Applause for the 2022 Budget Request.

• Author: Dougherty, Tara Murphy
• Position: Emerging Technology Horizons

The fiscal year 2022 budget request and congressional appropriations process is easy to criticize--its late submission, late completion and the negative impacts of these dates on the Defense Department and industry warrant some of these critiques.

There is, however, also quite a bit to applaud, especially when evaluated through a modernization lens.

In fact, what is most noteworthy about this year's budget process is not which defense modernization programs are winners and which are losers, but whether the department is sufficiently funding its modernization strategy at all. Taking the 2022 request and the final appropriations law into consideration, it appears that Congress may be more serious about modernization than the Defense Department.

The appropriations law provides a record $18.9 billion for defense science-and-technology. This is more than $4 billion above the administration's original budget request and is well above the $16.9 billion provided in 2021 appropriations. Congress also made very few cuts to the Defense Department's proposal, totaling less than 1 percent of the specific science-and-technology programs requested.

Finally, the bill increased the overall defense topline by roughly $40 billion above the requested $715 billion, within which Congress committed a significant share of the added funds to important science-and-technology activities. Notably, this higher spending level does not include an additional estimated $2 billion, which will be transferred from other research-and-development accounts to fund the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. In total, these funding levels represent a much-needed investment in critical modernization activities.

The final bill also provides funding dedicated to support the transition of technologies from research to acquisition programs of record and operational use. This transition--colloquially known as the "Valley of Death"--has been one of the greatest barriers to defense innovation since research-and-development in the United States shifted from predominandy federally funded activities to the commercial sector.

Funding for programs such as the Rapid Prototyping Program, the Joint Capability Technology Demonstrations program, the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve pilot and $100 million for the Agile Procurement Transition Pilot are all designed to provide bridges for innovative U.S. companies that otherwise find this valley...