A White Office of Management and Budget (OMB) legislative proposal to Congress last month to speed new start programs in DoD and allow up to $300 million in early design work would not impinge on congressional authority over modernization programs, U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 3.
“The movie Casablanca starts with a comment about refugees who come to Casablanca and wait and wait and wait,” Kendall said in response to a question from Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) on OMB’s new starts’ proposal. “I’m waiting right now. We spent the first year I was in office, defining what we needed to do to stay ahead of the pacing challenge–China, and I had to wait a year to get that into the budget, get the budget submitted. Now I’m waiting another year under normal circumstances for that budget to be passed.”
“If there’s a [FY 2024] Continuing Resolution, I’ll wait yet another year, and that is all time we are giving away to someone who is racing to be ahead of us technologically and fielded capability,” Kendall said. “We cannot afford that time.”
The OMB legislative proposal, disclosed by Kendall at last month’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado, would permit the military departments to spend up to $300 million for the early development phases of new programs even when Congress hasn’t approved a budget yet for a new fiscal year (Defense Daily, Apr. 19).
The proposal may especially benefit the Air Force, which Kendall said has proposed 12 new programs in fiscal 2024.
“We wouldn’t have to wait even the normal one year, one year and a half,” Kendall said of new starts under the proposal. “We would be able to do the low cost initial stages of a program, do the system engineering, the preliminary design work, maybe a little risk reduction, maintain competition, make no long-term commitments, only go up to the point of preliminary design review–one of the earliest milestones.”
“All that is relatively inexpensive, but it takes time,” he said. “And then Congress would have full authority to decide whether we could proceed beyond that point or not. We would probably use reprogrammings for this, and Congress would have authority over that so there wouldn’t be any real loss of the authorities that the Congress has over what we do, but we would gain a year and a half at least of lead time in getting things fielded.”