The Department of Defense’s comptroller believes it’s only a matter of time before the Pentagon’s budget eclipses a trillion dollars.
Michael J. McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, told reporters on Monday that it’s “inevitable” the budget will break the $1 trillion threshold. Top military leaders from the Pentagon and each of the service branches spoke to reporters about President Joe Biden’s new proposed 2024 defense budget.
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“Just do the math. The budget will hit a trillion dollars probably before — even if it only grew 3% a year, the numbers are what they are,” McCord explained. “It’s inevitable. And I think … that’s gonna be a psychological, big watershed moment for many of us, some of us, but it is inevitable. And it just reflects the growth of the economy, among other things.”
Biden’s budget, released last week, includes $842 billion for the Department of Defense and another roughly $44 billion for non-Pentagon defense spending, totaling approximately $886 billion. The request for Pentagon spending, specifically, is a $26 billion increase from the $816 billion that was enacted in the 2023 budget, and this most recent request is a tad below $100 billion more than the enacted 2022 spending.
McCord defended the president’s budget request despite noting there were certain things left out, though he explained they were low priority.
“Just back on the sufficiency of the top line, I would say the secretary believes this is a good number,” he said. “He’s happy with this number, and this doesn’t buy everything that we would have liked to do. We had some other good ideas as a collective DOD group that we could not get in at this level. But we got our highest priorities in, and we’re happy with that.”
He also noted the percentage of GDP spent on defense has gone down over time.
“In terms of the top line in general, again, the existence of an unfunded priority list does not prove that our budget’s insufficient, I don’t think. There are always things that we could be doing more of. But again, if you want to think of the budget representing our top 10,000 priorities, the unfunded list starts at 10,001,” he added.
When asked about the enlarging budget, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks told reporters, “We worked very hard to make sure we can defend the value the taxpayer and the war-fighter is going to get from any dollar that we put.”
Defense officials cited China as a major threat that affected the allocation of resources as identified in the budget details, which is in line with the department’s national security strategy.
“Nowhere is that alignment more pronounced than in the seriousness with which this budget treats strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” Hicks continued. “This budget delivers combat-credible joint forces that are the most lethal, resilient, survivable, agile, and responsive in the world. It is a force aimed at deterring, and if called upon, defeating threats today and tomorrow, even as the threats themselves advance.”
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Last November, the department completed its fifth annual audit, and while progress was made, the department failed it. The independent audit is a massive process in which independent accountants dig into every aspect of the department, an organization that employs nearly 3 million people with more than 640,000 assets located on more than 4,860 sites in more than 40 foreign countries.
“This department is, from the secretary on down, focused on making sure we can achieve clean audit opinion,” Hicks continued when asked about the budget in light of its failed audits. “We knew going in when this began as a priority for the department that it would probably take about a decade.”
