Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a Senate Armed Services Committee on March 28^th, 2023: “Do you support removing the statutory requirement to send Congress these (unfunded priorities) lists every year? And, if so, are you confident that we could do so without jeopardizing national security?”

Secretary Austin: “I would support that, Senator.”

Today, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced his support for efforts to rein in the practice of Unfunded “Priorities” Lists at the Pentagon. At Taxpayers for Common Sense, we have long derided the practice. After all, if you can’t squeeze a program into a topline north of $800 billion, how big a “priority” can it really be?

Secretary Austin, in response to questions from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), publicly opposed the statutory requirement for military services and combatant commands, among other subsets of the Pentagon, to produce these lists during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Only the military gets this second bite at the fiscal apple. A few years ago, in response to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates previously banning the lists, lawmakers enshrined this profligate practice in law. The military services, combatant commands, etc are required to produce these lists for Congress. This new requirement caused the practice to explode in size and cost. Last year we took a new approach to this issue, we teamed up with our colleagues at the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), digging up 19 lists that added up to more than $24 billion.

NTU and TCS are doing the same work this year. So far we’ve winkled out 13 lists that add up to more than $17 billion. We’ll continue to update this work as we unearth more of these wish lists.

Last Fall TCS joined an ideologically-diverse group in a letter to Congressional leaders opposing this wasteful practice. We’ll be supporting the Secretary of Defense’s position on this issue.

A letter sent to Senator Warren on March 20^th, from the Pentagon Comptroller, Mike McCord, said he believes Congress should, “reconsider the merits of this approach” and added,  “The current statutory practice of having multiple individual senior leaders submit priorities for additional funding absent the benefit of weighing costs and benefits across the department is not an effective way to illuminate our top joint priorities.”

In a statement, Senator Warren said, “The budget process requires making tough choices and setting clear priorities, and requesting billions of dollars in ‘unfunded requirements’ has been undermining that process. I’m glad that DoD agrees we need to repeal the requirement to provide these ‘wish lists.’”

We couldn’t agree more. We support bipartisan legislation – led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Mike Braun (R-IN), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Angus King (I-ME) in the Senate, and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Tom McClintock (R-CA) in the House – that would repeal this unnecessary statutory requirement. And we’ll be working to support lawmakers who seek to repeal this wasteful budgetary practice.