The Pentagon consumes the lion’s share of the discretionary budget. And spending on the Pentagon, which some believed should cough up a “peace dividend” at the end of the wars in the Mideast, has been on a steady upward trajectory. True fiscal conservatives, who believe that all aspects of federal spending should be scrutinized, are few in number on Capitol Hill.

There are a zillion ways to slice the salami on what constitutes “defense spending” so we created this handy cheat sheet for the Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) budget request. The important thing to remember is that “Pentagon” spending, at roughly $773 billion in FY23, is a subset of “national security” spending which is a little over $827 billion.

Unfortunately, there is little serious debate on Capitol Hill about reining in national security spending. In fact, Congressional mathematics when it comes to the Pentagon budget is all about addition when fiscal sanity is calling for some subtraction.

How does Congress add money to the Pentagon topline? Let us count the ways. The Constitution gave Congress the power of the purse, but when it comes to the Pentagon the purse is always open. It’s Congress’ job to review the President’s budget, hold hearings, and produce spending bills that reflect the will of the Congress. We just wish there was greater will to scrutinize Pentagon spending in a way that doesn’t just result in adding new programs or increasing spending on current ones.

Enter a requirement for the Pentagon to produce a new, “Report on Congressional Increases to the Defense Budget.” The first report is publicly available. It reveals at least $58.5 billion was added to the Pentagon’s topline by Congress, just in line items that exceeded the Pentagon’s request by at least $20 million. From more than 25 years’ experience, Taxpayers for Common Sense can attest Congress adds plenty of programs for far less than $20 million each. So, that $58.5 billion figure is a low ball, but we’re pleased for the transparency this report gives us.

One section of the new report is supposed to enumerate, “Any program or activity that the Department of Defense sought to divest from entirely, or requested zero units, but that was restored wholly or in part by Congress…”. The Comptroller report says they found no Congressional adds meeting that definition. The $20 million threshold doesn’t seem to apply to this, so we’re perplexed that some of the programs TCS identified in our Zero to Hero report on the Fiscal Year 2022 Omnibus Appropriations bill aren’t on this list. If the requirement was for items divested of entirely and requested at zero units, that would be one thing. If Congress keeps requiring the Pentagon to procure something they haven’t requested, it is probably never divested of entirely. But the requirement is for either/or. Either the Pentagon wants to get rid of all of it, and the Congress insisted on funding it, or the Pentagon asked for none of something, and the Congress gave them money to buy it anyway. We must be missing some nuance of the language.

It’s instructive to see where Congress added funds:

• Military Personnel accounts received an additional $947 million in just seven line items.
• Operation & Maintenance accounts received the largest increase of $25.7 billion, across 52 line items.
• Procurement accounts received $17.6 billion spread over 82 different items.
• Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) received $9.8 billion across 98 line items.
• Military Construction received an additional $4.3 billion directed to 78 different projects.

We’re compiling information on Congressional actions to add hundreds of unrequested RDT&E projects to the Pentagon spending bill. We plan to analyze trends in Congressional action. Is the number of so-called “program increases” increasing? [Spoiler alert: yes!]

In the Fiscal Year 2022 Omnibus Appropriations bill, the same year the Comptroller’s report covers, we looked at the RDT&E accounts for each military service and the so-called “Defense-wide” account that includes Special Operations Command and the Missile Defense Agency, among others. Check out our full analysis, showing Congressional RDT&E “program increases”.

We offer this quick snapshot from FY22 to show that the Comptroller report, while responsive to the Congressional mandate, doesn’t capture the entirety of Congressional program increases to the Pentagon budget.

The Comptroller report identifies 98 programs receiving an increase of $20 million or more.

Our analysis is of all Congressionally-directed program increases in RDT&E and the FY22 Pentagon spending bill shows at least 776 program increases in RDT&E, spread across the military services and the agencies funded in “Defense-wide” accounts.

Both analyses can be right, because we were counting different things. But the problem of Congressional mathematics – all addition and almost no subtraction – is very real.