UPDATED: Trump Announces Government Reopens For 3 Weeks WASHINGTON: The Pentagon won’t be able to release its fiscal year 2020 budget on Feb. 4 as previously planned because it has been caught up in the melee caused down by the 35-day government shutdown. The budget release could be delayed at least one month. The missed… Keep reading →

Now that President Trump has signed the fiscal 2019 defense appropriations bill — marking the first time in nine years that defense is not bound by a Continuing Resolution — the broad trend was cuts to Operational and Maintenance (O&M) to fund Research, Development, Testing, & Engineering (RDT&E). The top line was consistent with the… Keep reading →

When House Armed Services Chairman Thornberry proposed eliminating seven agencies and reducing personnel by 25 percent, he faced strong opposition. In the HASC’s draft bill, he scaled the proposal back to eliminating just three agencies. But that didn’t work either. During the committee’s markup of the House defense policy bill, members still pushed back.

The defense community is abuzz with talk of strategy and force expansion as the Pentagon develops the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy. Talk is nice but, as budgeteers like to say, “If it ain’t funded, it ain’t”. Building the forces the services say they need—with the readiness and modernization to support them— requires large budgets,… Keep reading →

Campaign promises of a larger, more ready and fully modernized military have slammed into budget realities as the Trump administration’s fiscal 2018 budget for the Pentagon shows only modest growth above what the Obama administration had projected. Funding at those levels will support a 305-ship Navy, not the 350 ships that candidate Trump proposed back in… Keep reading →

Two weeks from today America will either be a laughingstock or Congress will have done the responsible thing, the necessary thing, and passed some kind of useful spending bills. Or, as Mark Cancian, a former senior official at the Office of Management and Budget, suggests, there may be a sort of defense spending bandage to strap… Keep reading →

  UPDATED: Mulvaney Wins Confirmation Thursday By 2 Votes; McCain Only GOP to Vote No WASHINGTON: In a move that took some by surprise, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain, declared his opposition to President Trump’s pick to run the crucial Office of Management and Budget. McCain is the only… Keep reading →