When:
Tuesday, December 9, at 10 am ET
Where:
Zoom
Moderator:
John Donnelly, Senior Defense Writer at CQ/Roll Call
John Donnelly is a senior writer at CQ Roll Call, where he focuses on defense issues. He has netted numerous awards for his journalism, including the National Press Foundation’s Dirksen prize for the best reporting on Congress.
Panelists:
Gabe Murphy, Policy Analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense
Gabe Murphy is a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense focused on national security. His work includes tracking the Pentagon budget as it moves through Congress, highlighting wasteful programs, and exposing spending practices that drive the Pentagon budget ever upwards.
Julia Gledhill, Research Analyst at The Stimson Center
Julia Gledhill is a Research Analyst for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. She focuses her research and writing on Pentagon spending, military contracting, and weapons acquisition.
Pete Sepp, President of National Taxpayers Union
As President of the organization, Pete Sepp leads the non-profit, non-partisan National Taxpayers Union’s (NTU’s) government affairs, public relations, and development activities. Pete also oversees strategic planning for NTU and its staff and supervises the research and educational operations of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF).
Overview:
With national security spending on track to surpass $1 trillion in FY2026, panelists will discuss several largely hidden drivers of excessive Pentagon spending. Topics will include congressional increases to the Pentagon budget, acquisition reform, and budget reconciliation. Congressional Pentagon budget increases, often driven by parochial interests rather than national security, have been on the rise in recent years, with research and procurement increases totaling over $100 billion since FY 2022—yet most of these increases are offered anonymously, with unreported offsets that conceal tradeoffs, and then approved without public debate. Decades of reforms nominally aimed at accelerating the acquisition process and making it easier for smaller companies to compete have concealed cost and pricing data by gutting guardrails designed to ensure fair pricing of Pentagon contracts—and further “reforms” are making their way through Congress and the Pentagon. Lastly, the use of budget reconciliation as a vehicle for Pentagon spending has dramatically increased the Pentagon’s topline budget, and could lead to further increases if the current topline becomes a new baseline—yet the spending plans have been classified without explanation. How and why are these drivers hidden, and how can we bring them out of the shadows?
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