A new Taxpayers for Common Sense database reveals a staggering number and costs of congressional “program increases” to the Pentagon’s Procurement and Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) accounts in the recently enacted FY24 Defense Appropriations Act. The majority of these increases went to projects that were not requested in the Pentagon budget. Overall Pentagon spending is rapidly approaching $1 trillion a year and these parochial additions are contributing to the bloat.

What started as 635 program increases in the Senate version of the bill and 581 program increases in the House version came out to 1,072 program increases in the final bill, a figure slightly less than the sum of the two. This should not be confused with restraint—most of the reduction from the combined 1,216 proposals in the House and Senate versions occurred because both chambers sometimes funded the same program increase. In these cases, the final bill generally took the higher of the two numbers. Toward the end of the process, congressional leaders airdropped another $1.8 billion spread across 60 program increases that were not included in the original House and Senate versions. Consequently, the final bill allocates over $21 billion to procurement and RDT&E spending not requested in the FY24 Pentagon budget, including more than $11 billion for projects not funded at all in the request.

Click here to download the report or read the report below.