Clocking in at 3076 pages, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 is already two months late, since the fiscal year started on October 1st. But all expectations are that the House and Senate will now act quickly to pass the bill and send it to the President for signature.
Unlike some in Washington, at Taxpayers for Common Sense we actually read the bill. Magnifying glass in hand, fueled by coffee and sheer determination, we will find and highlight the issues we’ve been following throughout the year, as well as anything new that pops up. Check back frequently to see what we’ve found.
Click the links below to skip to the various sections of our analysis:
Military Construction is the Opposite of a Contingency
Costs to Resume F-22 Production Line
A Little Common Sense Finally Applied to the National Sea-based Deterrence Fund
Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) Deadline Rejected
B-21 Costs – Still Inexplicably Secret (UPDATED)
Clear Criteria for the Use of OCO Funds
Athletic Shoes – Running Away from Fiscal Responsibility
Military Construction is the Opposite of a Contingency
We’ve attacked this gimmick in the past, and Reps. Mulvaney (R-SC) and Van Hollen (D-MD) offered an amendment last year to strip these types of projects out of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account. Unfortunately, the Pentagon is still so awash in OCO money that military construction projects were once again asked for in the contingency portion of the President’s Budget Request.
And the House and Senate authorizers obliged. The final NDAA conference report includes more than $133 million in OCO funds for military construction. We’ll give them this much: it appears all the projects requested this year are overseas. (Although a few of them are labeled as “Worldwide Unspecified” so we can’t even say that for sure.) Here are the countries who will reap the benefits of these under the subset of OCO that’s called the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI). (Separate, presumably, from what we traditionalists think of as the organization to reassure Europeans: NATO!)
- Iceland
- Bulgaria
- Estonia
- Germany
- Lithuania
- Poland
- Romania
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Djibouti also gets two major military construction projects under OCO, but not as part of the ERI.
Now, the U.S. Government doesn’t have permanent military bases in some of these countries, but we’re spending contingency funds to make some major improvements to the bases belonging to foreign governments, like $7 million for a “Fighter Ramp Extension” at Graf Ignatievo in Bulgaria.
Military construction is the antithesis of a contingency. It is carefully planned for and it takes time to build. That the Pentagon continues to use OCO funds to improve foreign facilities is proof they have more OCO funding than they can appropriately spend.
No more OCO dollars for overseas military construction!
Costs to Resume F-22 Production Line
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The House Committee Report included a requirement for the Air Force to study the costs of resuming production of the F-22 aircraft. Back in 2009 the Congress made the decision to truncate this program at fewer than 200 airframes. The Air Force has noted that restarting the F-22 line is a non-starter since it would take funds from other, higher priority, programs. Those priorities include upgrading the F-22 already in the inventory.
The Senate had no such report language but one chamber of the Congress cannot amend the report of the other chamber, so the provision remains in the legislative history of the NDAA.
Hopefully the incoming administration will choose to shut down any possibility of re-starting the F-22, at least as long as the Pentagon is also buying the monstrously expensive F-35.
A Little Common Sense Finally Applied to the National Sea-based Deterrence Fund
At TCS we always cast a careful and suspicious eye on any changes to the authorities of the National Sea-based Deterrence Fund. This is a budget gimmick that would pay for the next generation of ballistic missile submarine outside of the Navy budget in this newly created fund. We’ve written a lot about how unwise this idea is.
The House version of the bill had several troubling provisions that would have expanded authorities to use this fund. First, the House bill would have expanded the transfer authority between accounts. It also would have included multiyear procurement authority. Finally, it would have transferred authority to spend the $773 million requested by the Navy out of the service’s shipbuilding accounts, where it belongs, to Section 4501, “Other Authorizations” which is a Defense-wide account.
The Senate version of the bill did not include these provisions and the Senate prevailed. With the exception of a limited enhancement of the multiyear procurement authority, none of these provisions is in the final version of the bill.
Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) Deadline Rejected
One of the worst ideas in the House version of the Pentagon policy bill was an artificial deadline of April 30, 2017 for spending the slush fund known as OCO. At TCS we led a coalition of fiscally conservative groups objecting to this provision. What we said at the time certainly came true, “Considering the final FY17 authorization and appropriations bills will likely not be enacted until late 2016, this provision would force the Pentagon to set spend rates that are potentially not executable, particularly in personnel spending.”
We were pleased when the Secretary of Defense agreed with us on this issue in his “heartburn” letter to the Congress detailing Pentagon concerns with the legislation. And we are also pleased the conferees agreed with our group of fiscal conservatives and the Secretary of Defense and scrapped this unwise provision.
B-21 Costs – Still Inexplicably Secret
Both the Senate and House versions of the Pentagon policy bill included provisions related to full disclosure of the costs of the Air Force’s next generation bomber, the B-21. The Senate version was much watered down from the original language preferred by Chairman John McCain. The final Senate language only limited funding for Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) until the Air Force released the value of its contract with Northrop Grumman Corporation. The House bill required the Secretary of Defense to submit to certain Congressional committees a report on the cost of the B-21.
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| Watch our video on the B-21 bomber program |
The lack of transparency on the full costs of the B-21 prompted TCS to give the Air Force our “Golden Fleece” award. We suspect the real motivation behind keeping the cost estimate secret is the Air Force’s long, tortured history of cost overruns. If the Pentagon doesn’t tell the public what they believe the cost of the program will be, we’ll never know how much the Air Force blows past that mark.
We weren’t holding our breath that a full public disclosure for the B-21 would materialize in the conference report but we were still a little shocked by the explanatory report language: “The Senate recedes. The House recedes. Neither provision was adopted.”
That’s not usually how these things play out. However, one entirely new piece of language appears elsewhere in the compromise bill. In four pages of meticulously detailed language (Spoiler alert: the more words it takes to legislate something, the more likely it is the Congress wants to appear to be doing something, without actually doing it) there is a requirement that the FY18 President’s Budget Request for the Pentagon include the “Submittal of Matrices” pertaining to program goals, key milestones and other timeline and performance issues. In the section referring to costs, the matrix is supposed to give six month estimates of the cost of the Engineering and Manufacturing Development and low initial rate of production phases of the B-21.
Make no mistake, this mumbo jumbo doesn’t mean the Air Force is disclosing the full costs of the program nor the full value of its contract with Northrop Grumman. It’s just wallpapering over a desire to keep those full costs secret.
That’s not usually how these things play out. But the Air Force and, presumably, the contractor won this round. We’ll keep writing about it and pushing for full disclosure of how much money the Pentagon is planning to spend on this program because taxpayers deserve to know.
Clear Criteria for the Use of OCO Funds
The House version of the NDAA included an amendment sponsored by Reps. Van Hollen (D-MD), Mulvaney (R-SC), Lee (D-CA) and Sanford (R-SC) to set guidelines on the use of OCO funds. It would have codified criteria developed by the Office of Management and Budget to clarify when military spending should be designated as “contingency operations” and requested as part of the OCO budget.
This bipartisan amendment was strongly supported by a diverse coalition of outside groups from the left, right and middle of the political spectrum. As a letter signed by those groups said, “Limiting the use of OCO to its original intent would help prevent the inclination to misuse it as a slush fund in order to avoid necessary spending reductions and prioritization.”
The Senate version of the bill included no similar provision and the final version of the bill doesn’t include this common sense provision to put practical limits on the use of OCO.
Athletic Shoes – Running Away from Fiscal Responsibility
In a sign of how far things have gone in the direction of anti-competitive practices that fly in the face of fiscal restraint, Exhibit A is this small but important issue. The New Balance corporation will, at least for a while, have a monopoly stranglehold on the sale of athletic shoes to new military recruits. Amendments in both the House and the Senate put athletic shoes under the same manufacturing requirement as clothing, tents, and tarpaulins. This particular protectionist law is called the Berry Amendment, and it’s been around since World War Two.
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| Photo credit: sling@flickr, Flickr |
When this bad idea was slipped into the House version of the bill, we wrote that it was time to retire the Berry Amendment, not expand it. Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) wanted to offer an amendment to strip this ridiculous new requirement, but the amendment was not allowed. When similar language was accepted to the Senate version of the bill, we saw the handwriting on the wall.
Indeed, the final version of the bill includes this provision with an amendment allowing DoD, for two years, “to purchase additional footwear that is necessary to provide sufficient choices to minimize the incidence of athletic injuries in initial entry training.” But don’t get too excited, Mr. (or Ms.) Secretary, the conferees still expect you, “to the maximum extent practicable, to furnish footwear from domestic sources”.
Protectionism is alive and well.
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