It wasn’t looking good for the Growlers. The Boeing-made fighter jets, used to jam enemy radar, were left out of the Pentagon’s budget for next year. And with spending strictly limited by a budget cap, the plane seemed headed for extinction.
But in reality, the Growlers aren’t dead yet. Like dozens of other programs, the EA-18G Airborne Electric Attack Aircraft, as they’re officially known, have ended up on something called the “unfunded priorities list,” an inventory of what the Pentagon would like to buy if it had several extra billion dollars to spend.
Securing a spot atop the Navy’s list has given Boeing hope, and the company has launched an aggressive lobbying campaign, in the media and on Capitol Hill, where it has urged lawmakers to come up with $2.1 billion for the 22 airplanes the Navy has said it would like to buy.
As Congress begins to wade through the Pentagon’s budget this week, deciding what stays and what goes, lawmakers will face a temptation that it has not seen in the past few years: robust wish lists, loaded with all sorts of shiny, new things they supposedly cannot afford to buy.
Former defense secretary Robert Gates had all but banned the lists, which allow the services to bypass the secretary’s office and go directly to Congress. But now, in an election year, they are back — resurrected by a member of Congress — stark reminders of how even in an era of tightened budgets, defense spending exerts a powerful pull.
Critics say dangling page upon page of ships, aircraft and training programs before Congress can act as a gateway to the kind of out-of-control spending that lawmakers have vowed to curtail. If the items were such a priority — or a “requirement,” as they are sometimes called — then they would have been funded in the first place, they say.
Or put another way, said American University’s Gordon Adams, an expert on defense spending, they are like telling a 4-year-old he absolutely can’t have a lollipop and then asking: But if you could have a lollipop, what flavor would you want?
“The services game the system with the expectation that there will be more money,” Adams said. “So they don’t make the hard choices. Nothing has been done to truly suppress the appetite of the services… . It’s an undisciplined and chaotic process right now.”
For the second year in a row, the base defense budget is held under a strict budget cap, $496 billion, that is supposed to force Congress and the Pentagon to make tough choices about what to fund. That figure is several billion dollars lower than just a few years ago. Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, requested the supplemental lists earlier this year, saying that “defense funding is substantially underfunded to meet national security requirements.”
He wanted his fellow members to see what options were available as they begin marking up the budget starting Wednesday.
“You can’t really understand the trade-offs until you see what landed on the cutting-room floor,” said Claude Chafin, a spokesman for the committee.
Budget experts say that if Congress wants to give in to the temptation of the list, it has a mechanism for freeing up cash to buy things: The Overseas Contingency Operations fund, which pays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be used as a buffer.
Even though the wars have wound down, the war fund has remained robust. Last year, it hit about $85 billion, nearly $6 billion more than the Pentagon asked for. And Congress has used that additional money to make room for items in its base budget, said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
He estimated that the Defense Department last year moved $20 billion worth of expenditures from its base budget to the war fund, and then Congress shuffled over $10 billion more. That freed up $30 billion in buying power for the base budget.
“It’s a big shell game, but Congress wrote this loophole into the law and both Congress and the Pentagon have shown they are willing to use it,” he said.