If you’re a TCS frequent flyer and read a lot of our budget commentary and analysis, you already know this: When an Appropriations Bill is made public, always read the General Provisions! (Follow us on Twitter (@taxpayers) for more budget nerd life hacks.)

Appropriations bills are meant to dole out your tax dollars to federal agencies for purposes of keeping the U.S. government running. Money, not policy. There are myriad other committees of Congress that are supposed to pass the legislation setting policy for those agencies. In reality, only the Pentagon gets an annual authorization bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which has passed for the last 63 years and counting.

But Congressional appropriators can’t be kept in the funding box and, so, they get their legislative freak on by sneaking language into the so-called “General Provisions” portion of their bills. And for the draft Pentagon spending bill released on Monday, the 140 pages of text devotes 97 of those pages to General Provisions. So that’s a mere 42 ½ pages to spend a whopping $762 billion (~$18 billion per page!), and 97 pages to tell the Pentagon what they can and can’t do in FY23 (mostly can’t.)

Many of these provisions are old chestnuts that appear year after year after year, telling the Pentagon they can only purchase certain items from U.S. domestic manufacturers. (We also talk about this in our latest Budget Watchdog AF podcast. Give it a listen and sign up to have it magically appear in your podcast app twice a month!) Appropriations legislation covers only the coming fiscal year, in this case FY23 beginning in October. So, except in a few rare cases, these provisions must appear every year to keep the Pentagon from purchasing any of the following from a foreign manufacturer:

• certain kinds of anchor and mooring chain,
• carbon, alloy or armor steel plate,
• ball and roller bearings,
• supercomputers,
• American flags, and
• auxiliary equipment for Fleet Oilers, Frigates and the still to be designed Cable Laying and Repair Ship and Oceanographic Surveillance Ship.

Appropriators also use their power of the purse to stop the Pentagon from getting rid of legacy systems or moving some military units from one Congressional District to another.

• No relocation (costing more than $500,000) of any military unit into or within the National Capital Region.
• No reduction or disestablishment of the 53^rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron in Mississippi.
• And, the Grandaddy of all Nopes: Nope, Secretary of the Navy, you can’t retire five of the nine Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) that were listed in the President’s Budget Request.

That last prohibition on retiring more than half of the LCS hulls requested by the Secretary of the Navy, combined with last week’s actions in the House Armed Services Committee bill, means many of the planned retirements will probably be blocked. Again, Congress is substituting its military strategy for the one developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in conjunction with the service secretaries.

So, remember, Appropriations shenanigans can always be found in the General Provisions. Read ‘em and weep!