President Biden’s defense budget request for fiscal year (FY) 2024 includes a record $886 billion for the national defense budget – the vast majority of which goes to U.S. military spending.
The $886 billion for defense is $28 billion, or 3.26 percent, higher than the $858 billion defense budget Congress enacted in FY 2023.
Here are three reasons why we at National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) are skeptical of the 2024 Biden defense budget request, and believe all taxpayers should be too.
The Biden Budget Request Is a Floor for Congress, Not a Ceiling
It’s a popular maxim in recent years that presidential budget requests are “dead on arrival” in Congress. There are kernels of truth to this: Congress holds the constitutional power over the nation’s purse strings, and every presidential budget request contains spending and revenue proposals that both parties in Congress are likely to ignore.
But the defense budget request during the Biden era has been subject to a unique phenomenon: what the Biden administration requests for the defense budget has been a floor, rather than a ceiling, for Congress. For the 2022 and 2023 budget requests, lawmakers in both parties – but especially the Republican Party – insisted on day one that the Biden defense topline was not enough. We expect no different for the 2024 budget request. In fact, Senate Armed Services Ranking Member Roger Wicker (R-MS) said before the budget request was made public, per Politico’s Connor O’Brien, that the “numbers ‘are going to be inadequate’ and Congress will work to increase it again.”
Defense hawks will likely make the case that national security threats from China and Russia require topline defense budget increases beyond what President Biden has requested. Other defense hawks may claim that ongoing inflation requires a budget increase several percentage points higher than the president’s request (more on the fallacy in that thinking below). And NTUF will be closely monitoring the “wish list” (i.e., unfunded priorities list) requests of the military branches and combatant commands, most of which are required by law and will serve as a blueprint for lawmakers to increase the defense budget by billions of dollars – if not tens of billions of dollars.
Defense Budgets Don’t Need to Rise With Inflation
Since the National Defense Strategy (NDS) Commission recommended in 2018 that the defense budget increase three to five percent above inflation annually to meet the needs of the NDS, this figure has become a gospel truth of sorts among defense hawks, even though the NDS Commission itself acknowledged the number was “more illustrative than definitive.”
While inflation – especially high inflation like the kind the U.S. has experienced in the past year-plus – does affect the Pentagon’s purchasing power, particularly on goods the Department needs a lot of like food and fuel, some spending at the Pentagon need not keep up with inflation.
Every year, service branches wish to retire aging programs or weapons that are no longer serving the needs and priorities of service branch leaders and members of the Armed Forces. The Air Force’s A-10 Warthog is just one prominent example. Congress regularly doesn’t let the service branches retire or eliminate programs they want to eliminate, often for narrow, parochial, or economic reasons.
Sometimes the service branches want to cut newer programs or weapons too, with the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) serving as a poster child. Congress has also refused to let the Navy retire the LCS, despite troubling failures in the fleet and tremendous cost overruns in the development of the ship.
And Congress regularly orders more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (JSF) than the Air Force and Navy ask for, even though the aircraft has become a $1.7 trillion boondoggle that can’t even fly half the time.
There’s no indication that the A-10, LCS, and F-35 program budgets have to increase with inflation, nor many of the other procurement or research and development (RDT&E) programs in the Pentagon’s budget. Congress can afford to cut, and the military can withstand cuts, in those programs even if inflation is putting upward pressure on food and fuel budgets.
The “Wish Lists” Are Coming
NTUF expects that in the coming weeks the service branches and combatant commands will submit billions of dollars in additional unfunded priorities requests to Congress – colloquially referred to as “wish lists.” There were over $24 billion in wish list requests submitted to lawmakers last year, many of which were fulfilled in the final defense budget.
These wish lists serve as a roadmap for the many lawmakers looking to increase the defense budget beyond what the Pentagon has requested. Lawmakers should stop this practice, and repeal the statutory provisions that require branches and commands to send these wish lists to Congress each and every year.