The Pentagon is aligned with Rep. Mac Thornberry and his newly unveiled effort to slash billions of dollars in spending on military support agencies, Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan said Tuesday.
Shanahan said he sees “huge opportunities” to increase productivity and streamline the 28 agencies and activities targeted by Thornberry. The so-called Fourth Estate operates outside the military services and spends about $100 billion annually.
Thornberry, who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, introduced legislation last week that would impose a mandatory 25 percent cut in the spending and eliminate seven of those agencies, which has drawn the opposition of unionized civilian workers in the Defense Department.
“What I would say in terms of Chairman Thornberry, and I’ve met with him a number of times on this subject, is we are aligned in our thinking about the opportunity and potential to streamline the Fourth Estate,” Shanahan said during a breakfast meeting with defense reporters.
But the depth of any cuts still appeared uncertain, despite Thornberry’s initial call for $25 billion or more in reductions.
“The degree and the timing, I’m not really familiar with what’s been outlined by him … I don’t know what the final number will be, but he’s been at this a lot longer, so I would trust his judgment about the potential,” Shanahan said.
Experts who testified to the House Armed Services Committee last week questioned whether 25 percent of the support budget could be slashed. They said two-thirds of the Fourth Estate spending goes to military health operations, intelligence operations, missile defense, and special operations.
Thornberry released his plan for the cuts ahead of the committee’s drafting of the National Defense Authorization Act in the hope that reforms could be included in the annual bill.
Shanahan said the Pentagon is focused on consolidating operations and modernizing the support agencies to wring savings out of the Fourth Estate. He said the Pentagon’s new chief management officer, Jay Gibson, is looking at about 10 areas for reform.
Savings could come through artificial intelligence that allows better decision-making or by combining procurement systems for the hundreds of military health clinics, he said.
“When we think about reform, how I tend to think about it is, how do we restructure ourselves so that we can be much more productive and much more responsive?” Shanahan said.
Meanwhile, Thornberry’s proposal to eliminate seven agencies has triggered concern among workers.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 270,000 Defense Department workers, wrote a letter to Thornberry last week asking him to abandon the plan.
“The people part always seems to lead. There’s this assumption there are all these people standing around with their hands in their pocket and not working hard,” Shanahan said. “I think what we find is we have processes, management systems, and IT systems that have evolved over years and years that were never designed to scale to the size that we are, and so people are stuck in process.”
