An End To Pentagon Wish Lists?

In a move that could inject some much needed discipline into the annual process of crafting the Pentagon budget, the department’s comptroller, Mike McCord has signaled that the department now opposes the legal requirement that the military services submit annual “wish lists” of items they would like to have that have not been included in the administration’s official budget request. In a letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), McCord stated that “The current statutory practice of having multiple individual senior leaders submit priorities for additional funding . . . is not an effective way to illuminate our top joint priorities.”

McCord’s letter was reinforced by Secretary of Defense Austin at yesterday’s hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he responded yes to a question from Sen. Warren about whether he would support ending the wish list requirement.

The Pentagon’s new stance was made in response to persistent pressure from Warren, who has long demanded that the Pentagon rein in the wish lists, known formally – and misleadingly – as “unfunded priorities lists.” As Taxpayers for Common Sense has noted, “if you can’t squeeze a program into a topline north of $800 billion, how big a “priority” can it really be?”

Warren has been joined in the effort to end the wish list requirement by a bipartisan group of lawmakers that includes Senators Angus King (I-ME), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Mike Braun (R-IN) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Tom McClintock (R-CA). Those five members plus Warren sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in January

of this year urging him to rein in the wish lists and support legislation to remove the statutory requirement for the military services and combatant commands to provide them to Congress.

Taxpayers for Common Sense and the National Taxpayers Union identified 19 separate wish lists totaling $24 billion that were submitted to Congress in connection with the Fiscal Year 2023 budget, and they have already identified 13 lists worth over $17 billion related to the Fiscal Year 2024 budget that was introduced earlier this month, with more to come.

The wish lists have been used by hawks in Congress as one of their main tools for adding tens of billions of dollars in funding to the Pentagon budget beyond what the department even asked for. Members frequently draw from the lists for items to add to the department’s request. Total add-ons – many drawn from the wish lists – were $25 billion in the Fiscal Year 2022 budget and a whopping $45 billion in the Fiscal Year 2023 budget.

The additions often have more to do with bureaucratic and parochial interests than any well thought out strategy – things like extra ships and aircraft built in the states or districts of key members of Congress and inserted into the budget because of the jobs and revenue associated with them.

This is no way to make a budget, or defend a country. But the practice of submitting wish lists has persisted for years, with a brief interruption during the tenure of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, when the practice was discouraged, and the size of the lists was significantly reduced.

Hopefully the Pentagon’s new stance will tip the balance in Congress in favor of eliminating the requirement that the wish lists be generated and shared with Capitol Hill. But it will be a tough battle. Many members who have benefited from the unnecessary, added systems that bring jobs and money to their districts will likely fight to keep the wish list requirement intact. It will be a battle between common sense budgeting and special interest politics.

It’s important to note that wish lists are just one tool in the hands of the arms lobby when it comes to supersizing the Pentagon budget. The arms industry has multiple avenues for influencing members of Congress. The organization Open Secrets has documented the $83 million in campaign contributions the weapons sector made in the past two election cycles; its employment of 820 lobbyists – far more than one for every member of Congress; and its use of the revolving door to hire thousands of former senior government officials to do its bidding.

There are also special groups within Congress focused solely on increasing spending on specific kinds of weaponry, from the Joint Strike Fighter Caucus, which routinely tries to add more F-35s to the budget; to the ICBM Coalition, a group of Senators from states with ICBM bases or maintenance activities that has fended off any efforts to reduce funding or deployment of land-based nuclear missiles; and the Shipbuilding Caucus, which has led the charge in adding billions to the Navy’s annual shipbuilding budget request. All of these networks involve members who have components of the weapons in question built in their states or districts, or bases that host the relevant systems.

The jobs card reigns supreme in Congressional budget making, but the power of the jobs issue is based in significant part on an exaggerated sense of the economic importance of the arms industry. According to the National Defense Industrial Association – the arms industry’s largest trade association – total direct employment in the weapons sector has decreased dramatically since the mid-1980s, from 3.2 million people then to 1 million people now – less than six-tenths of one percent of the total national labor force. Add to this the fact that virtually any other public investment would create from 40% to 100% more jobs than Pentagon spending, and a path towards reducing economic dependence on the department’s budgetary outlays becomes clear.

Shifting funds from excess Pentagon spending towards other urgent national priorities can create hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more jobs than continuing to spend more than half of the federal discretionary budget on the Pentagon. But a change of that magnitude will require a major transformation of the political alignment in Washington and around the nation. In the meantime, we shouldn’t let exaggerated claims regarding jobs in the defense sector dictate our national security policy.

Decreasing the political and economic power of the arms industry will be an ongoing challenge. But beginning to impose some discipline on the runaway Pentagon budgeting process by ending the requirement for wish lists is something that can be done now – and the sooner the better. Hopefully it will be just the first step towards a budget process that puts rational defense planning above pork barrel politics and narrow corporate interests.