Deep Dive: Unfunded Priority Lists

Each year, the Pentagon’s civilian leadership crafts a budget request, accounting for budget constraints and the needs of each military service branch and combatant command and explaining the rationale for each program request in a series of justification books. Then, the President submits this request to Congress, and Congress exercises its prerogative to actually appropriate funds, using the budget request as a starting point.

Unfunded Priority Lists (UPLs), wish lists for funding that was not included in the President’s budget request, subvert this holistic, deliberative process, and cost taxpayers billions of dollars in the process. In Fiscal Year 2024, UPL requests totaled more than $18 billion. In FY 2025, these requests totaled over $30 billion.

Since 2017, Congress has required military service leaders and combatant commanders to submit UPLs. Funding requests on these lists are not subject to the same justification requirements as the requests included in the formal budget request—they are not required to include long-term cost projections or national security rationales. The UPL requirement also undermines civilian control of the military, a cornerstone of our Democracy, by forcing uniform leadership to circumvent the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, including the Commander-in-Chief.

Multiple Secretaries of Defense and other Pentagon leaders have taken issue with these extrabudgetary wish lists. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates changed the original name of the lists from unfunded requirements lists to unfunded priority lists to underscore that the items on these lists are not in fact requirements. He also urged military service leaders to operate through the normal budget process rather than submitting UPLs to Congress. In response, Congress instituted a requirement for the submission of UPLs in the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). More recently, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke out in support of repealing the requirement for UPLs, while Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord wrote that the UPL requirement “is not an effective way to illuminate our top joint priorities.”

Military service leaders have also asked Congress not to fund UPLs at the expense of greater priorities included in their budget requests, yet Congress regularly cuts items included in the request while adding funds for UPLs.

Thankfully, legislation in Congress called the Streamline Pentagon Budgeting Act offers a blueprint for repealing the UPL requirements that would reduce wasteful spending while still allowing military service leaders and combatant commanders to submit UPLs when they deem it absolutely necessary.

Resources on Unfunded Priority Lists