Dear Representative:

During consideration of H.R. 3838—Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026—Taxpayers for Common Sense, a national nonpartisan budget watchdog, urges you to support the following amendments to protect taxpayer interests.

We recommend a vote in favor of the following amendments:

• Amendment #897 (#58 in the rule) sponsored by Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Eli Crane (R-AZ), and Mark Pocan (D-WI) would require any component of the Department of Defense that fails to achieve a qualified or unqualified audit opinion to forfeit 0.5 percent of its budget to the Treasury Department for deficit reduction. The amendment exempts military personnel accounts and the Defense Health Program account, and allows the president to waive the requirement if they certify that such a reduction would harm national security or members of the military deployed in combat zones. The Pentagon has repeatedly failed to receive clean audit opinions on most of its components, and failed to achieve such opinions on the timelines it has laid out for itself.¹ This requirement would create meaningful incentives for the Pentagon to improve its financial accounting processes in order to achieve clean audit opinions across the department’s components.
• Amendment #56 (#125 in the rule) sponsored by Reps. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) and Steven Horsford (D-NV) would require an annual report for four years on taxpayer savings achieved through oversight of fraud, waste, and abuse in defense spending. This requirement will help illuminate taxpayer savings achieved through oversight efforts and help evaluate the efficacy of efforts to save taxpayer dollars through oversight of fraud, waste, and abuse.

We also note that the Rules Committee denied you the opportunity to vote on several pro-taxpayer amendments that would have prohibited lawmakers and their immediate families from owning stock in defense companies, established a review panel on fair and reasonable pricing in defense contracts, and repealed the statutory requirement for the Pentagon’s unfunded priority lists. We hope these critical taxpayer issues will get consideration in the future.

Should you have any questions about our recommendations, please do not hesitate to contact our policy analyst, Gabe Murphy, at gabe@taxpayer.net. Thank you for your consideration of our requests.

Sincerely,

Steve Ellis
President

[1] “Pentagon Fails Audit for 7th Straight Year.” Taxpayers for Common Sense. Nov. 18, 2024. https://www.taxpayer.net/national-security/pentagon-fails-audit-for-7th-straight-year/