Fellow Examines Troubles in National Security Budgeting

Just mentioning the word "budget" can make any planner squirm, but many policymakers know little about budgets despite the reality that funding makes it possible to implement policy, said Wilson Center Fellow Gordon Adams. "Most policymakers are not trained in fiscal issues, especially how to put resources behind policy."

Over the past seven years, national security resources have increased rapidly. In fact, the defense budget has nearly doubled but the budget processes are not working as they should, Adams argued.

Adams served as associate director for National Security and International Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from 1993-1997. As the senior White House official for national security budgets, Adams observed that the national security and foreign policy agencies are not cohesive and the budget planning disjointed. He called it "a diaspora of spigots," adding, "the only place they all came together was at my desk at OMB."

Many federal agencies lack strategic, long-term planning and budgeting mechanisms, he said. With foreign assistance, the budget work of the executive and Congress is still governed by the bulky 1961 Foreign Assistance Act and a "rabbit warren of amendments to the Act," said Adams.

Moreover, "almost every national security agency has a dysfunctional or broken budget process, including the Defense Department, which once had the best long-term planning processes in government," said Adams. Emergency supplemental funds for Iraq have broken the Defense budget for years, which Adams said has sapped the regular planning and budget process in the Pentagon. "Since World War II, we were never in a conflict for more than two years without putting war spending back in the budget process."

The budgetary relationship among agencies also is dysfunctional. "Our most important security issues require an interagency response, yet there is no institutional capacity in the White House or National Security Council to plan and budget in an integrated way," he said.

Adams said the Iraq war illustrated the budgeting problem. "The executive branch never planned for the post-combat phase," he said. "There was no stabilization or reconstruction budget either in the agencies or across them." The government is still scrambling to catch up to this problem.

Scant literature exists on the way the government provides resources for national security policy. This inspired Adams and Cindy Williams, a professor at MIT who previously served as director of the national security division at the Congressional Budget Office, to co-write a book to be titled, Buying National Security: Transforming the U.S. Resource Planning Process for the 21st Century.

This forthcoming book will examine the agency budgeting stovepipes and recommend reforms within and across agencies. He and Williams will suggest, among other innovations, that the NSC and OMB lead a biennial guidance process for key national security issues, setting program and budget priorities for agencies, and that a separate integrated national security budget request be sent to Congress every year.

Adams knows this won't be easy. He said, "It will take real diplomacy to execute this change in the budget process."