Military Construction (MILCON) and family housing accounts in the Fiscal Year 2021 Omnibus appropriation bill total $8.3 billion. This is a little over $500 million above the Trump Administration request but, more importantly, it is a reduction of more than $3 billion from the amount appropriated in FY20 – $11.3 billion.

This is an interesting trend at the end of the administration that famously reprogrammed MILCON funds from items like refurbishing and modernizing schools and hospitals for American service people and their children to instead build more useless border barriers. The Trump administration managed to end-run the Antideficiency Act, and Congress, by declaring a bogus “emergency” to violate Constitutional norms. Good riddance to that tactic. It will be interesting to see what the Biden administration will request for MILCON and family housing next year – we’re guessing there will be several years of increased requests to make up for the damage caused by President Trump’s overarching demand for money at the southern border.

Something we hope the Biden Administration will stop is the practice of paying for some overseas MILCON with the Overseas Contingency Operations off-budget slush fund. As we’ve been saying for several years, if you’re building a storage complex, it’s no longer a contingency operation. The Omnibus Appropriation continues this wasteful practice by paying for projects in Germany, Romania, and Spain as well as projects in “unspecified” countries, with a suspiciously even $350 million in OCO funding. The programs range from a “Dangerous Cargo Pad” to and “EOD Boat Shop”.

The programs that are in Germany, Romania, and Spain are all identified as being part of the “European Deterrence Initiative” which, like the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, is funded entirely with OCO dollars. Call us skeptics, but we think the allies would feel better about these initiatives if they were part of the Pentagon’s base budget and not an unstable slush fund.