Come the end of this week, the Federal government might actually—for real this time—shut down for lack of a budget. Congress is debating a measure today that would fund the Feds for another week, and the Pentagon until Sept. 30, provided that billions are cut from other parts of the federal budget. Even if this happens, military leaders and analysts say that the continuing resolutions (CR) have already done damage to their modernization programs—damage that may be permanent/.../
“Even at this point if we get a full FY11 appropriations bill,” says Todd Harrison, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says, “the DoD will still spend the next half of the fiscal year trying to clean up the mess that’s already been created in terms of not being able to ramp up programs like they had planned/…/”As far as the two Virginia-class subs that the Navy was scheduled to buy this year, the CSBA’s Harrison says that since the Navy has already secured several extensions on the contract, “they can wait a little longer [but] at some point they’re not going to get any more extensions from their vendor, and that opportunity will be lost this year.”For many of the weapons systems that have seen their production schedules hit by the budget mess, “we’ll see some permanent schedule slips that can’t be recovered,” Harrison says, “and I think we’ll see some cost inefficiencies that are going to persist as contracts that have been negotiated lapse because we haven’t been able to obligate the money in time. So there are going to be some long-term impacts for having to manage finances this way.”