Fiscal Year 2024 Pentagon Funding Bill Passes House

This week, the House of Representatives considered the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passing dozens of amendments to the bill. Today, it cleared the final hurdle in the Republican-led House by a vote of 219-210. 

Earlier this year, TPA highlighted major reforms that were needed to the Department of Defense (DoD) in order to prevent wasteful spending. This comes at a time when the U.S. military budget is larger than the next 10 countries’ defense spending combined. These reforms include needed changes to unfunded priority lists (UPLs) and the F-35’s Adaptive Engine Transition program (AETP).

UPLs have existed since the 1990s, but the submission of annual reports on unfunded priorities became a requirement as part of the FY17 NDAA. By 2021, these pentagon wish-lists cost taxpayers $18 billion. Costs ballooned to $49 billion a few short years later in FY23. For reference, this amount is similar to the entire Agency for International Development (USAID) budget, and more than NASA’s $32 billion budget in FY23. 

This year, the Pentagon’s UPLs totaled $16.4 billion. That’s more than the President’s budget requests for entire departments. It dwarfs the Department of the Treasury ($16.3 billion), Department of Labor ($15.1 billion), Social Security Administration ($15.5 billion), Department of Commerce ($12.3 billion), Environmental Protection Agency ($12 billion), and Small Business Administration ($987 million). 

Seeing the trend in these high-cost lists, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and Seth Moulton (D-Mass) took action by offering an amendment to this year’s NDAA which would strike the 2017 submission requirement. Unfortunately, the House Rules Committee rejected their amendment, preventing it from receiving an open vote on the House floor. The group has now introduced the amendment as standalone legislation, the Streamline Pentagon Budgeting Act. 

While the House failed to act on UPLs, they sadly found time to bring the AETP back from the dead. During last year’s NDAA process, TPA called attention to the hidden consequences of the AETP for taxpayers. We followed up on this with a letter to the DoD in October 2022, highlighting further consequences and the need for robust cost-cutting actions on the F-35 program as a whole.

When the Pentagon sent its budget request to Congress in March, it wisely chose not to include funding for the AETP. However, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) decided to push forward $588.4 million anyway. The inclusion of further AETP funding ignores a clear reality: the F-35 is prohibitively expensive, and adding more to it only increases costs. 

Currently, the projected lifecycle cost for the F-35 is $1.7 trillion, representing over 5 percent of the national debt and equating to roughly $3,500 for every man, woman, and child in the nation. Replacing the current engine on the Air Force’s F-35A model via the AETP would add over $6 billion to this cost, and the supply chain issues that arise from having two different engines could result in a further $40 billion cost to taxpayers.

The FY24 NDAA now moves to the Senate, where hopefully UPL requirements and AETP funding will both be removed from the $886 billion defense policy bill.

Michael Mohr-Ramirez is Federal Policy Manager at Taxpayers Protection Alliance