Congress rarely appropriates planned funds for military operations, military construction and veterans services on time, and it looks like it’ll happen even later than usual.
And while both chambers approved a short-term stopgap to keep the government from shutting down and prevent critical employees like active duty military personnel from staying on post without pay — there’s a cost to kicking the funding can down the road, local members of Congress and economists say.
It’s particularly steep in Hampton Roads, where a fifth of residents are in the military or are veterans or members of military families, and where thousands more make a living providing services to the Department of Defense.
“These continuing resolutions have a huge impact on Hampton Roads,” said Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Norfolk.
The biggest is that it locks in DoD and Veterans Administration spending at levels set for the fiscal year that ended in September — but the House of Representatives has voted to authorize spending an additional $24 billion on defense, she said.
Much of the increased money in the House authorization bill, and a similar measure pending in the Senate, would go to shipbuilding and repair, including an accelerated pace for ordering the Virginia-class submarines, which are built by Newport News Shipbuilding and Electric Boat.
But until the separate appropriation bill is enacted, that’s just an aspiration. The continuing resolution is a stopgap measure to make sure the government doesn’t shut down when Congress hasn’t formally appropriated money.
“Every Continuing Resolution is wasteful, and they harm our military’s ability to perform the missions we call on them to do,” said Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Westmoreland. “They lead to insufficient training, unmaintained equipment, and decreased readiness. Under a Continuing Resolution, all spending remains the same, meaning that we can’t fund new programs, cut outdated ones, or plan for the future.”
It doesn’t look as if enacting the defense department’s appropriation bill, one of the 12 separate measures that detail how much money goes for exactly which programs, will happen before January or February, said Sen. Tim Kaine, who like Luria and Wittman, serves on his chamber’s Armed Services Committee.
So, while Congress passed its continuing resolution to fund the government through Feb. 18 at fiscal year 2021 levels, “it means we’ll be underfunding defense by $25 billion,” Kaine said, referring to the total in the Senate version of the authorization bill.
The Senate authorization bill is hung up in a dispute over amendments , including an effort by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, to keep the Defense Department from enforcing a vaccine mandate on defense contractors.
The Senate has to pass that authorization bill, and the House and Senate have to negotiate changes to resolve any differences in their versions before a promised 2.7% pay increase for the military can take effect. The continuing resolution did not fund that, although in theory it could have.
“With rising food, gas, and other costs, an NDAA (authorization bill) that is stalled into 2022 would hurt lower ranking service members the most,” said Robert McNab, director of Old Dominion University’s Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy.
By the time the authorization bill and then the actual appropriation bill are enacted, “we’ll be five months in the fiscal year, and so you’re spending that in seven months, and is that efficient?” Kaine said.
In fact, the Navy told Luria that relying on continuing resolutions instead of simply passing an annual appropriations bill on time shrinks its effective purchasing power by $14 billion. Much of that comes in ship maintenance and repair, she said.
The reason: if the funds are not appropriated, contracts can’t be signed. The extensive, often months-long process of producing the plan for a maintenance or modernization project — the result is often the equivalent of a several-hundred-page book — can’t get started. The shipyard doing the work can’t order materials; subcontractors, too, are hung up.
“It just backs everything up,” Luria said.
She’s also worried about VA programs, after a talk last week with Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough.
A continuing resolution slows VA efforts to hire staff, she said, and the Hampton V.A. Medical Center, for instance, has struggled to find the employees it needs to cut waiting times. More are needed to tackle the rise in claims for compensation and benefits that came with the pandemic, Luria added.
A continuing resolution also slows construction projects, such as the outpatient center planned for a site on the Chesapeake Regional Healthcare campus on Battlefield Boulevard, she said.
“A CR has two broad implications: first, it increases uncertainty about future funding levels and when those levels might occur, and second, it increases inefficiency,” said ODU’s McNab,
Still, if Congress had not passed a continuing resolution, the impact here would have been dire, he said.
“Without a continuing resolution, we would experience a partial government shutdown. … many federal employees would either be told to go home or to show up for work without pay,” McNab said.
“This would also create havoc for many government contractors in the region.”
Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com
