President Biden recently released the outline of his $1.5-trillion fiscal year (FY) 2022 discretionary budget. There’s a whole lot for taxpayers to be worried about in this blueprint: multibillion-dollar increases to the budgets of the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), for one, and a functionally flat Department of Defense (DoD) budget, for another, when cuts to DoD are long overdue. However, there is one victory in the President’s FY 2022 budget that is a long time coming for taxpayers, many civil society organizations, and taxpayer advocates like NTU: the possible end of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) slush fund.
President Biden “discontinues requests for Overseas Contingency Operations as a separate funding category,” and calls this a “significant budgetary reform.” It is, indeed, a significant reform. NTU has critiqued DoD budget waste for decades, during Republican and Democratic administrations. This holds especially true of the OCO account, which NTU and others have been pointing out for years is an unaccountable slush fund for the military. In May of 2020, NTU wrote a comprehensive issue brief on the tens of billions of dollars of waste that has been stuffed into the OCO account over decades, along with a number of short- and long-term reform options for the OCO account. The most important recommendation? Ditch the account altogether.
And soon after Joe Biden was elected President, NTU and five other taxpayer advocacy organizations wrote to the Biden-Harris transition team, asking them to wind OCO down and out.
It’s encouraging, therefore, to see the President proposing to do away with the OCO account in its entirety for FY 2022. Hopefully, this reform is a permanent one.
That said, this proposal has just taken its first step. Congress would need to act to see this through. And while it may be easier for Congress to eliminate OCO in a world without discretionary budget caps, at NTU we are disappointed and dismayed that President Biden folded the base and enduring budget items in OCO right back into his DoD budget request, possibly untouched. Therefore, even when accounting for the elimination of OCO, the overall DoD budget is roughly flat compared to where it was last year. NTU and other organizations across the ideological spectrum have identified $80 billion in possible DoD budget cuts this year alone, and both the Biden administration and Congress should seriously consider them. With the national debt at $28 trillion and counting, and with the federal government coming off a multi trillion-dollar COVID-era spending binge, budget discipline from policymakers is necessary now more than ever. Each political party will have to sacrifice some favored programs and initiatives, and for Republicans who typically defend sky-high DoD budgets, we urge them to keep responsible Pentagon cuts on the table.