Congressional appropriators early Thursday morning unveiled their final $824.3 billion fiscal year 2024 defense appropriations bill, which includes a compromise to fund six of the Pentagon’s multi-year munitions requests and over $200 million for the department’s new Replicator attritable drone initiative.
The defense spending legislation arrives as part of a six-bill, $1.2 trillion spending package that lawmakers are set to consider ahead of a partial government shutdown deadline at midnight on Friday.
“We said from the very beginning that if we all work together in a reasonable, bipartisan way, we can fund the government responsibly. Senate appropriators held more than fifty committee hearings, received input from virtually every member, and marked up and advanced twelve strong bipartisan bills out of our committee for the first time in years. Much of that work is reflected in this final product. There is zero need for a shutdown or chaos—and members of Congress should waste no time in passing these six bills, which will greatly benefit every state in America and reflect important priorities of many Senators,” Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair and vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, said in a joint statement.
The $824.3 defense spending bill, which arrives nearly six months into the fiscal year, represents a $27 billion topline increase over FY ‘23 and which adheres to the one percent spending cap set by last year’s Fiscal Responsibility Act, while including a $3 billion increase to both the procurement and research and development requests for FY ‘24.
The House is likely to first take up the spending package on Friday and may pick additional support from Democrats, many of which had opposed a slew of conservative GOP-led policy riders in the lower chamber’s original version of the bill, including blocking funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and climate-related policies at DoD, that have been removed from the final legislation (Defense Daily, June 22 2023).
The Biden administration in a statement on Thursday said it “strongly urges swift passage” of the spending package.
“This bipartisan legislation, which represents a compromise between Republicans and Democrats that adheres to the Fiscal Responsibility Act, would fund the remainder of the federal government through the end of the fiscal year, while investing in key priorities for the American people,” the White House said. “The administration urges the Congress to send this critical legislation to the president’s desk for signature without delay and to quickly pivot to the bipartisan national security supplemental.”
The final defense bill does not include the Senate Appropriations Committee’s (SAC) previous proposal to add $8 billion to the topline for emergency spending above the defense spending cap mandated by the debt ceiling agreement (Defense Daily, July 27 2023).
While the foreign aid supplemental with tens of billions dollars in further assistance for Ukraine remains pending before Congress, the defense bill does include $300 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative to purchase U.S.-made weapons for Kyiv.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Monday that any Ukraine aid-related funding included in the final FY ‘24 defense appropriations bill would provide “some relief” to the ongoing delay in passing the supplemental but would not be “sufficient” (Defense Daily, March 18).
Among the most significant compromises between House and Senate Appropriators original versions of the defense spending legislation was settling on supporting six of the Pentagon’s seven multi-year munitions procurements, supporting such contracts for Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile, Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] GMLRS rockets, PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors and LRASM and JASSM-ER missiles and RTX’s [RTX] AMRAAM missiles. The bill does not cover DoD’s request to use multi-year authority for RTX’s SM-6 missiles.
Senate appropriators’ bill had supported the full slate of seven multi-year munitions requests, while the House Appropriations Committee’s version of the legislation did not include the requests for AMRAAM and SM-6 missiles (Defense Daily, June 23 2023).
“The agreement supports greater use of multi-year procurement contracts for critical munitions to increase the Department of Defense’s stocks of such munitions, improve warfighting readiness, stabilize the defense supply base with predictable production opportunities, and increase defense industrial capacity,” lawmakers wrote in a joint explanatory statement. “This authority, and any associated funding, will provide the department with the ability to procure more munitions at a lower cost through fiscal year 2028 as compared to single year procurements.”
Lawmakers also direct Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to provide semi-annual reports on each of the munitions multi-year procurement awards to include details on projected and realized cost savings, updates on impacts of supply chain investment, identification of potential risks and analysis on how using this authority has created supply chain stability.
Although the FY ‘24 National Defense Authorization Act expanded the list of munitions eligible for multi-year procurement authority, the Pentagon did not include any new requests for multi-year munitions procurements in its FY’ 25 budget submission (Defense Daily, March 14).
“There’s no new [multi-year requests] in here. We’re hoping to get started on the ones we asked for a year ago. But we didn’t add new ones to the list. Seven [munitions] is a lot to start [with] in one year. So I guess it’s just as well that we didn’t start with any new ones because then we’d be on the hook to do quite a lot in however many months it’s going to be into FY ‘25 before we get the FY ‘25 funding,” a senior defense official told reporters ahead of the FY ‘25 budget rollout.
As the Pentagon moves ahead with its Replicator initiative to field thousands of attritable autonomous systems by August 2025, lawmakers have included more than $200 million for the first year of the effort.
“Inclusion of [Replicator] funding in this act demonstrates that existing authorities, when used purposefully and judiciously, are responsive to emerging needs,” lawmakers wrote in a joint explanatory statement on the bill.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks first announced the Replicator initiative last August, detailing the effort to produce and field thousands of “all-domain attritable autonomous systems, or ADA2 capabilities, over the next 18 to 24 months “to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass” (Defense Daily, Aug. 28 2023).
Hicks confirmed last week that the Pentagon plans to spend $1 billion over the next two years on Replicator, to include $500 million in FY ‘24, of which $200 million is now supported in the defense spending legislation and the remaining sought in a pending reprogramming request, and another $500 million included in its FY ‘25 budget submission (Defense Daily, March 12).
The defense spending bill also directs Hicks to brief on the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees within 60 days of the legislation’s passage on Replicator, to include spending profiles and requirements for selected capabilities and the concept of operations for these systems’ planned employment.
While many specific details of Replicator remain classified, Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, said on Wednesday the service will be “the biggest participant” for the first round of Replicator “in terms of quantity” (Defense Daily, March 20).