As we write this, the House of Representatives is considering yet another stop-gap spending bill for the entire federal government, this time through March 11^th.

Fiscal Year 2022 began on October 1^st of 2021…more than four months ago. Due to Congressional inaction not a single appropriations bill to fund even one federal agency has made it through the process and been signed into law. This is a problem and means every agency is operating under a so-called Continuing Resolution (CR) holding programs at Fiscal Year 2021 funding levels.

This is sub-optimal and at Taxpayers for Common Sense we’ve long railed against the practice. Congress needs to stop acting like college kids: skipping that 8:00AM class and then waking up on the morning of the final to realize they don’t know enough about the subject to answer the exam questions. (We’ve all had that nightmare, right? Not just us?)

In a recent Weekly Wastebasket we reported on a House Appropriations Committee hearing where Pentagon witnesses were invited to explain why they’re special and should be shielded from the negative effects of a CR on training, hiring and purchasing. The hearing conveniently ignored a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on processes the Pentagon has implemented to “avoid delays and cost increases during the fiscal years affected by a CR.”

Hmm. As TCS analysts noted in our recent podcast, “Budget Watchdog: AF”, the folks who wrote that GAO report could have made substantive contributions to the Congressional hearing. If only they’d been invited to testify on a topic they recently studied and wrote about!

So where are we going with all this subconscious use of the prefix “sub”? Well, even though the Navy witness at last month’s hearing actually admitted the Pentagon is getting “good at” dealing with the effects of a CR, the draft of the stop-gap measure to take us through March 11^th includes a huge anomaly for the Navy.

One might even say the Congress is subsidizing a particular favorite of the Congressional shipbuilding caucus.

Have the clues been too subliminal to catch? Okay, we’ll give it to you straight: the Navy’s next generation ballistic missile submarine, the COLUMBIA class is getting a substantial advantage over other federal programs. The Congress wants to accelerate more than $1.6 billion in spending, “to prevent significant schedule delays.”

We put that last bit in quotes because it comes from the “Section-by-Section Summary” of the CR provided by the House Appropriations Committee. The actual bill language opening the floodgates for an additional $1.6 billion of your tax dollars is remarkably non-specific.

‘‘SEC. 164. Notwithstanding sections 102 and 104, amounts made available by section 101 to the Department of Defense for ‘Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy’ may be apportioned up to the rate for operations necessary for ‘Columbia Class Submarine (AP)’ in an amount not to exceed $1,601,805,000.”

That’s it. Just 42 words to allow the Navy to accelerate spending $1.6 billion on the COLUMBIA program, now. That’s roughly $38 million per word for those of you keeping track.

To be clear, this is money that is in the pipeline to be spent on the program. But we object to yet another example of the Congress insisting that the Pentagon is some kind of special case, as if every federal agency doesn’t have procurement programs suffering because Congress can’t get its act together on appropriations matter.

Every federal agency deserves to have its Fiscal Year 2022 funding bill passed.

We’re rating this substandard work by Congress.