It’s that time of year; the most wonderful time of the year! We’re talking it’s time for our much-anticipated, much-loved, much-shared product that we hope launches 1,000 memes – the “Zero to Hero” list for the Pentagon spending bill in the Senate. Take a peek. Senate Appropriators added just under $5.5 billion in procurement programs alone.

How do we calculate what ends up on our Zero to Hero lists and what doesn’t? We scour the informative tables in the spending bills and find the budget lines where the President’s budget requested zero dollars, but the House or Senate appropriators inserted funding. What doesn’t end up on these lists are the many, many programs that were already in the President’s budget, but received a boost in funding from appropriators. We’re big believers in the Congressional power of the purse. On budget matters it’s been said the President proposes and the Congress disposes. We get that. But in a national security budget request of a whopping $827 billion (see our handy-dandy cheat sheet on “national security” v. “Pentagon” spending), we believe if an item didn’t make it into the request, it can’t be much of a priority.

Last year, when all was said and done, the final Pentagon spending bill buried deep in the Fiscal Year 2022 (FY22) Omnibus Appropriations bill had a Zero to Hero list of procurement and research & development programs of just a hair under $3.4 billion. That list was a product of some serious compromise between the House list for both Procurement programs and Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) of roughly $1.4 billion and the massive Senate list of $6.3 billion in just Procurement adds. So, we guess the Senate is showing some restraint this year? And in case you missed the inference, that’s totally sarcasm on our part.

As was the case last year, the Senate Appropriators have run so wild with their Zero to Hero adds in RDT&E, that we haven’t got time for the pain of trying to put them all into one chart. (H/T to Ms. Carly Simon.) Besides, it would be such an eye chart that even our youngest followers would be reaching for the 3.0 power cheaters to read it. But, we’ve started tracking RDT&E adds in a new way and will be rolling out that information later this Summer. Stay tuned!

As a reminder, the House-passed version of the Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) Pentagon spending bill which was released in June, had a hair less than $1.6 billion in both Procurement and RDT&E Zero to Hero adds. There’s a lot of real estate between $1.6 billion and $5.5 billion. We’re here to read the bills, scour the charts, and produce the next Zero to Hero meme when the final numbers are calculated. Follow us for more budget nerd life hacks and get back to groovin’ on some 1970s rock.