The Impact of Continuing Resolutions on the Department of Defense and Services
House Appropriations Committee – Defense Subcommittee
January 12th, 2022 – 10:00 AM EST
Witnesses:
- General David H. Berger
Commandant of the United States Marine Corps - General Charles Q. Brown Jr.
Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force - Admiral Michael Gilday
Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy - General Joseph M. Martin
Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army - Mr. Mike McCord
Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) - General John W. Raymond
Chief of Space Operations of the United States Space Force
On Wednesday, January 12th, at 10 AM EST, the Defense Subcommittee of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee held a hearing on the impact of continuing resolutions on the Department of Defense (DOD) and services. A continuing resolution (CR) would allow for a freeze, or restriction, on spending to have it continue at the same level of the previous year, or Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21), without the opportunity to acquire new or additional contracts or programs.
All witnesses emphasized the negative impact a continuous CR would input on the DOD and its branches. A CR was noted to not only limit the abilities of each DOD branch and its functions, but also limit or weaken the DOD’s ability to protect the United States and its interests, today and in the future.
Below are statements from the witnesses pertaining to the effects of a continuing CR:
- “Continuing Resolutions are backward looking, destabilizing and decelerating. For the past 30 months, I have attempted to accelerate change in support of our approach to the Nation’s pacing challenges, while concurrently generating the ready forces that create advantage… A CR is the last thing a force seeking to accelerate modernization needs. It represents a return to the budget uncertainty that has plagued the Department for more than a decade. It is a return to the ‘normalization of deviance’” – General Berger
- “As much as a year-long Continuing Resolution affects our Air Force fiscally, the impact it has to our rate of change is more shattering. All the money in the world cannot buy more time; time is irrecoverable, and when you are working to keep pace against well-resourced and focused competitors, time matters.” – General Brown Jr.
- “For the Department of the Navy, under a full-year CR, the net shortfall between the CR funded level and the FY-22 request is $4.4 billion. However, when adjusted for CR funding restrictions on new starts, production rate increases, and appropriation rate increases, a full-year CR would misalign $14.0 billion in resources. 24 new starts and 15 production rate increases to critical programs would go unexecuted. End strength would be reduced, maintenance and training events cancelled, and fleet and family services curtailed. The impacts would ripple down to the industrial base, with programs falling below minimum sustaining rates, resulting in possible shutdowns or furloughs of smaller suppliers and loss of experienced workers.” – Admiral Gilday
- “In sum, a year-long CR would cause severe impacts to the Army’s ability to take care of our Soldiers and their families, to be ready to respond to emerging operational requirements, and to make necessary funding alignments and adjustments needed to support readiness and to modernize our Army. The Army strongly urges Congress to pass all of the FY 2022 Appropriation bills (i.e.—FY 2022 Defense and Military Construction Appropriation bills) and avoid the complex, undesirable, and unnecessary impacts of a full-year CR.” – General Martin
- “One of the central insights for me, when serving on the Commission on the National Defense Strategy for the United States, is that our competitors, China and Russia in particular, use all the pieces on the chessboard against us, not just their military assets. We are competing on the diplomatic front, the economic front, the military front, the cultural front, the innovation and technology front. If we take this competition seriously, as we should, as our adversaries do, then we cannot afford the inefficiencies that this pattern demonstrates and enables. Time is money, and year after year we give away time in lengthy CRs. We do not have such an insurmountable edge that we can afford to fritter away one third of our time, year after year, while our competitors move as fast as they can.” – Mr. McCord
- “We are in a competition with China and Russia, where the stakes are access to, freedom of action in, and stability and security of a domain that every American depends on daily, and every warfighter relies on to successfully accomplish their mission; we cannot afford risks imposed by a yearlong continuing resolution (CR). For the Space Force, those risks fall into three categories: establishment of organize, train, and equip functions; mission readiness; and modernizing for resilience.” – General Raymond
For a recording of the full committee hearing, please visit the House Appropriations Committee hearings calendar.