On Friday, March 11th, 2022, all Federal government funding ends. While a government shutdown is not an option, there are key decisions in the next 60 days on whether to continue last year’s appropriations levels until the Fall, consider an Omnibus all-encompassing bill, or pass individual bills per Department and agency. Despite the Administration’s earlier request for over $4.1 Trillion to support all federal agencies, including the DoD, Congress did not adhere to a deadline of September 30, 2021 (the end of the Fiscal Year), and opted to “kick the can down the road”. They extended spending at last year’s level until December 3rd and then again until February. Adding to this uncertainty, after the President’s State of the Union on Tuesday, March 1, 2022, the Congress will receive the Fiscal Year 2023 Federal budget requests for this coming year’s cycle. Soon thereafter, staff within each agency will set out funding levels and programs for the next Fiscal Year (2024), due at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by Thanksgiving. This will be four fiscal years of allocations, a true “traffic jam” for those who seek to influence federal programs and funding.
This unusual situation greatly impacts decisions at all levels of government, with a special adverse impact in the Department of Defense (DoD) and related national security agencies. As of this article, the DoD Fiscal Year 2022 Appropriations legislation has yet to pass the Senate. Those seeking to propose new military policies, allocations, or weapon system projects last year were focused on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY22, the Defense Appropriations bill for the same Fiscal Year (FY), and Military Construction Appropriations. This issue generated a unique public hearing on January 12, 2022 by the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee in which all four military branches’ witnesses presented their concerns on a lack of FY funding which would restrict new production of needed weapon systems and have a negative ripple effect throughout our national defense structure. Most all recent NDAA’s have been passed and signed into Public Law by the President well within the FY Fall deadlines. The following are examples of the last four years:
Fiscal Year
NDAA
DoD Appropriations
2022 PL117-81—Dec. 27, 2021 -
2021 PL116-28—Jan. 1, 2021 PL116-260—Dec. 27, 2020
2020 PL116-92—Dec. 20, 2019 PL116-93—Dec. 20, 2019
2019 PL115-232—Aug. 13, 2018 PL115-245—Sept. 28, 2018
Historically, since 1976, there have been instances of funding “gaps” in allocating appropriations bills, and in some cases “shutdowns”. These “shutdowns” usually only extended for a week or two, the longest being 21 days. However, even during the longest “shutdown”, the DoD Appropriations bill was not impacted as it passed Congress by December of that year (PL 104-61, Dec.1, 1995). Uncertainty in production schedules, federal contracts, procurement needed, planning on construction decisions, as well as a whole host of impacts on employees, businesses and the ripple effect on the economy can also be directly attributed to this delay. Impacts are felt up and down the governmental structure, reaching the state and local levels as well. The following is an example of the DoD appropriations decisions from this year’s legislation showing delays, uncertainties, and lack of outcomes:
In the next 60 days, the leadership of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the leaders of both the House and Senate, as well as key Chairman and Ranking GOP members in the US Congress, will be making the following decisions with their professional staffs and input by the Administration:
The avoidance of deadlines and appropriations funding requirements in “regular order” in the Congress has additional considerations by influencers in their strategies. The Fiscal Year 2022 allocations, which is what we are focused on, will have additional potential changes that leaders and key staffs will contemplate not just in the next 60 days, but for this 2nd Session (2022) of the 117th Congress. Some of these items are:
The next 60 days are critical to finalize funding decisions. Perhaps the next 180 days will also be critical in how a very divided Congress and Administration work to develop a Fiscal Year approach to three if not four levels of federal funding. The key questions in achieving one’s objective in this environment is who to influence, when, and how?