Taxpayers for Common Sense has a long history of calling out the “Unfunded Priorities Lists” (UPLs) as a thinly disguised mechanism to give the Pentagon another bite of the budgetary apple. Given that the Pentagon gobbles up the largest portion of the discretionary budget pie, its clear military authorities aren’t starving for cash. It is time for Congress to stop baking up new ways to dish excess cash to the Pentagon and cut out these UPLs. (And now we’re hungry for apple pie…but we won’t be distracted from this important topic!)

To recap, this is an old practice that started informally when the military service chiefs appeared at Congressional hearings and were asked what weapon systems didn’t make it into the final budget request. From that modest beginning, these wish lists have grown to include research projects, military construction, you name it. And they’ve now been enshrined in law.

As of now, at least nineteen offices within the Department of Defense are statutorily required to undertake this wasteful practice of going around the Office of Management and Budget and the rest of the federal budget process to give Congress lists of “priorities” that weren’t in the final President’s Budget Request. And that list is set to grow with the House of Representatives seeking to require the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office to cook up its own UPL starting next year.

In 2022, TCS gathered all the lists we could get our hands on, and it’s quite a collection. We found nineteen, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more that we couldn’t wrinkle out. Our friends and fellow fiscal conservatives at the National Taxpayers Union did the math, and these lists total at least $24.3 billion in “priorities” the Pentagon couldn’t squeeze into its $773 billion topline. If Congress fulfills all these “wishes,” the Pentagon topline would rise to more than $797 billion!

Now that the Senate is mixing up the ingredients of the annual Pentagon policy bill, enter an interesting, bi-partisan group of U.S. Senators who believe cooking up savings in the federal budget is as American as apple pie. Senators Warren (D-MA), Braun (R-IN) and Lee (R-UT) are serving up two pieces of legislation as amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to trim this practice. It is fair to say there aren’t a lot of things these three Senators can all agree on but making the Pentagon accountable for the prudent use of your federal tax dollars is one of them.

One bill, the Streamline Pentagon Budgeting Act, would repeal statutory UPL requirements. An unforeseen burden from making UPLs mandatory is that DoD branches and commands that have no unfunded priorities to request are still required to make an annual report to Congress saying that.

The other bill, the Cull Unfunded Requirement Budget or “CURB” Act, would require the portions of the Pentagon that claim to have unfunded priorities to justify those requests by simultaneously proposing offsets within their branch or command budget. The CURB Act would also require these lists to be publicly available. Hey, that would free up some time for the budget watchdogs at Taxpayers for Common Sense!

We joined ten other organizations, representing a wide swath on the ideological spectrum, to write a letter of support for these bills to be included in the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2023.

Now, we’re off to have a big piece of apple pie to celebrate this bipartisan, common-sense approach to the Pentagon budget. Looking for a recipe to make one for yourself? Try this one.