Congress is poised to give the Pentagon flexibility on when and how it can spend the cash windfall it is set to get in a massive government spending bill unveiled Wednesday.
Under the bill, known as the omnibus, the Pentagon would be allowed to spend up to 25 percent of its operations and maintenance funds in the last two months of the fiscal year. It would also have more flexibility to reprogram funding.
The omnibus “provides additional flexibility to the services to spend operation and maintenance funding, as requested by the Department of Defense, while still ensuring accountability of the disbursement of taxpayer funds,” a summary of the bill reads.
The omnibus would provide $700 billion for defense spending in fiscal 2018, an $80 billion increase over caps that were lifted as part of a budget deal. That number covers the Pentagon, as well as non-Pentagon defense programs such as the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons program.
The amount is everything the Pentagon wanted, but it is coming halfway through the fiscal year. As such, Pentagon officials have been expressing concern that they’ll have to rush to spend the money in the remaining six months of the fiscal year, leading to unwise decisions.
To remedy that, officials asked for reprogramming flexibility and for relief from the so called 80:20 rule, which prohibits federal agencies from spending more than 20 percent of their funding in the final two months of the fiscal year.
But they also asked for the ability to roll over operations and maintenance funds into the next fiscal year.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday ahead of the omnibus’s release, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said he would have gone further with flexibility than what is in the bill.
“I think the Pentagon is pleased with that,” he said of the flexibility in the bill. “It may not be quite as much as I would like, but they did something.”
Still, he and other Republicans touted the topline dollar amount for defense, saying it will start reversing a so-called readiness crisis that has caused a rash of deadly incident in recent years.
“Our troops have become collateral damage in this dangerous game of politics, consistently being held hostage to the political issue of the moment,” he said in a statement Wednesday night. “That is a shameful practice that has to end.”