The Pentagon’s acquisition chief said Tuesday a potential government shutdown would be “extremely disruptive,” citing impacts to testing and acceptance of new equipment.
Bill LaPlante, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, offered his perspective as Congress has just days to consider a continuing resolution (CR) to avoid a shutdown and allow both the House and Senate more time to work on passing final fiscal year 2024 appropriations bills.
“There’s two different things, right, [and] they’re both bad. One is real bad and one’s just so bad. One is a CR, the other’s a shutdown,” LaPlante said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies discussion on Tuesday. “If the government shuts down, it’s worse. Testing will stop. Acceptance by the government of equipment, when it is finished and ready to be accepted, can stop.”
With the end of the fiscal year rapidly approaching, the Senate is readying its own CR proposal and may begin the process of considering the stopgap funding legislation as early as Tuesday evening.
House Republicans last week rolled out their own one-month CR deal, which exempted defense funds from a spending cut but did not include further Ukraine aid, with the proposal receiving immediate pushback from Democrats and some GOP members (Defense Daily, Sept, 18).
The Pentagon is restricted from starting new programs under a CR, with LaPlante noting the stopgap funding measures and a shutdown’s block on production increases as the department seeks to continue supporting Ukraine and replenishing its own stockpiles of critical munitions.
“I have some testing we want to do next week on an item for Ukraine. Unless we can get some type of a waiver, which we’re going to get, it’s not going to happen,” LaPlante said.
A potential shutdown would also impact DoD personnel’s ability to travel and lead to furloughing large numbers of the department’s employees deemed to be “non-essential.”
“Can you imagine if the Chinese had something like this where their government would shut down every few years and they would freeze their budget and not start up things for six months? We would not view that badly. If we could teach them how to do that, that would be helpful,” LaPlante said.
The House is set to consider another procedural vote on its $826.5 billion defense spending bill on Tuesday evening, after the legislation stalled out twice due to several conservative GOP members breaking from their party to vote against the rule for floor debate (Defense Daily, Sept. 19).