The Pentagon should study its response to automatic budget cuts and document “best practices” because they may be needed during the next period of budget uncertainty, the Government Accountability Office said Thursday.
“Without documenting and assessing lessons learned and best practices, such as strategies for evaluating interdependence of funding sources and programs, and leveraging existing mechanisms to share this information, [the Defense Department] is missing an opportunity to gain institutional knowledge that would facilitate future decision making about budgetary reductions,” GAO said in its report.
Pentagon officials have scrambled to meet the demands of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which mandated an annual cut of about $50 billion from defense spending through 2021, while also coping with the uncertainty caused by partisan squabbling in Congress that has prevented the passage of regular defense budgets for most of the past decade.
A steady parade of military leaders has warned lawmakers that this “chaos” is hurting national security, and have asked for an end to the sequester cuts. But the political will to repeal them isn’t there, though a budget deal worked out in December 2013 reversed $31.5 billion of the automatic cuts for fiscal 2015 by extending sequestration savings through 2023.
The GOP-controlled Congress has promised to pass a regular budget for fiscal 2016, but that effort already is mired in controversy over plans to use war spending to cover $38.3 billion in military operations and maintenance costs that can’t be met under the sequestration rules.
