Parochialism is getting out of hand this week as the Senate Appropriations Committee did a huge data dump of nine spending bills to fund the federal government for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2022. That’s right; three weeks into the fiscal year, the Senate Appropriators finally released the details of its position on spending priorities for the current fiscal year.

Focusing on the legislation that accounts for the largest portion of discretionary spending, the Department of Defense spending bill, Taxpayers for Common Sense analyzed the bill for procurement programs that weren’t requested in the massive President’s Budget Request. These funded but not requested programs make – drumroll please… our famous “Zero to Hero” list.

Historically our Zero to Hero lists cover both Procurement and Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) programs. In fact, our Zero to Hero covering the House Appropriations Committee’s version of this same legislation included RDT&E. But Senate Appropriators have run rampant with this funding practice across both procurement and RDT&E programs.

First, in last year’s (FY2021) Senate bill, the Appropriators added $3.6 billion in procurement programs that weren’t requested by the Pentagon. This year, the bill almost doubles that with adds totaling $6.4 billion in procurement programs the Pentagon didn’t ask for. Okay, a whopping two of the 54 programs the Senate would add were on the so-called Unfunded Priorities Lists: an Army watercraft modernization service life extension program for $13.6 million and the Navy’s request for $7 million worth of initial spare parts for a KC-130J trainer. So, that totals $20.6 million out of $6.4 billion the Senate is adding. The rest is pure parochialism by Senators.

Second, why doesn’t today’s chart include the RDT&E Zero to Hero adds? Well, last year the Senate appropriators added seven RDT&E programs that totaled $227 million. This year, the SAC added more than 30 total unrequested programs in just the first two of 35 pages of RDT&E programs. So, we’ll be reading and typing for a while before we get the Zero to Hero RDT&E chart finished this year. But we didn’t want to delay getting our procurement findings to our dedicated readers.

Another point of comparison is the Fiscal Year 2022 House Appropriations Committee Zero to Hero chart. House Appropriators added $1.1 billion in totally unrequested procurement programs in its consideration of the Defense Appropriations bill. Another $300 million was added for RDT&E programs the Pentagon never asked for. Still not acceptable. But next to the Senate the House seems downright responsible – Senate Appropriators asked for more than six times as much money in unrequested procurement programs than the House committee did. One of the next steps in the appropriations process will be the House and Senate meeting to hammer out the differences between the two versions of the bill, (assuming the Senate eventually passes this bill).

We’ve been around the block a few (dozen) times with this. You would think “negotiations” between a position that adds $6.4 billion in unrequested procurement programs and a position that “only” adds $1.1 billion would compromise and land at a number of roughly $3.8 billion. Well, you would be wrong. Instead, these negotiations will likely be 100% additive. The “compromise” position will most likely be (surprise!) $7.5 billion in programs the Pentagon didn’t ask for.

In a President’s budget request of roughly $730 billion for the Pentagon it’s hard to believe these procurement programs can be much of a priority if they didn’t make the cut. And while we don’t believe lawmakers should be a rubber stamp for the administration’s request, we also know that contractor lobbyists are the driving force behind these procurement adds.

And so it goes. But unlike the lyrics by Billy Joel, TCS wants to make sure we aren’t the only ones who know.