The White House decision to seek about one-quarter of its gargantuan
$1.5 trillion defense-spending request as reconciliation funding leaves some of the military’s
top priorities—munitions, industrial-base upgrades—up to lawmakers’ appetite for another precedent-breaking budget maneuver.
The Army, for example, is asking for $24.5 billion to fund purchases through DOD’s Munitions Acceleration Council, according to budget documents. The service is also asking for $206 million to expand and upgrade its own weapons factories—ten times the amount requested in last year’s reconciliation bill.
“We have all of these incredible things that we're trying to do and move forward, but acceleration is only as good as our counterparts on the Hill are able to push it forward as well, right?” Maj. Gen. Rebecca McElwain, the Army’s budget director, said Thursday during an Association of the United States Army event. “So, if we get our funding halfway through a fiscal year, that could complicate things.”
Last year’s reconciliation bill is a case in point. After months of back and forth, the bill finally passed in July, with just weeks left in the fiscal year. Then it took the Pentagon another seven months to produce its plan to spend the money, including $2.6 billion for Army procurement.
And there is no guarantee that Congress—which broke precedents to pass last year’s reconciliation bill—will approve the administration’s request for a new one worth twice as much to the Pentagon.
“When we're looking at reconciliation, you can see very clearly what will not be accelerated, and a lot of that is in our munitions and our industrial base,” McElwain said. “I would say that would slow it down, especially some of the multi-year programs that we have that are vested in there with the munitions.”
The Army doesn’t decide which parts of its funding request will go into which bill, and the administration hasn’t been open about its strategy to fund so much of the government through reconciliation.
The difference in funding types means that an appropriations bill has line-by-line mandates for how each dollar is spent, while a reconciliation bill is a big check that the department can ultimately divvy up as it sees fit, though Congress makes recommendations and agencies report back their spending plans.
“Mr. Secretary, the administration is taking an enormous risk by asking for $350 billion in priorities through reconciliation,” Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this month. “As we told you in our last meeting, reconciliation is not the best way to fund the department. Last year, reconciliation created broken glass—funding holds for vital programs that the appropriators had to fix. And that's why we need the information in a timely fashion.”
Her concern is a bipartisan one. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who chairs the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, railed against the reconciliation bill last year and recently lamented the administration’s request for a new one.
“The distinction between base and reconciliation really matters,” McConnell said during a hearing earlier this month. “Base funding is what creates budget stability for the services and sends consistent demand signals to industry, and base funding is what gets extended by short-term continuing resolutions when work on full-year appropriations is unfinished.”
McConnell cautioned against a Republican administration relying on a Republican majority to get its budget requests funded, especially for money that goes toward longer-term investments.
“As I said last year, reconciliation should be a supplement to, not a substitute for,” he said. “Political realities will not always allow for party line, budget reconciliation, and if the department's top priorities aren't built into annual appropriations. We're actually taking a big risk.”
There are also concerns about the timing of how separate pots of money are distributed, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., SAC-D’s ranking member, said at the same hearing.
“Last year, $150 billion was provided to the department, but the mismatch between base year and one-year, between long-term and short-term, caused tens of billions of dollars in errors,” he said. “Errors in how shipbuilding was handled, errors in how new munitions are being acquired. And working together on a bipartisan basis, we fixed many of those problems.”
Coons warned that this year’s near-tripling of that amount could result in even more of those errors.
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