“Generally speaking in terms of how Congress will authorize and appropriate money and how DoD can request reprogramming, it has to go to Congress,” Cohn said. Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso, to block Pentagon funding from going to wall construction was initially approved by the House Armed Services Committee, but later was stripped out of the annual defense policy bill. “It is the fact that money in DoD is appropriated by numbers … and anything that is appropriated within those accounts, within those larger pots of money, you have to go back to the Congress to get permission to move it,” the former official said.Īn amendment last fall sought by U.S. Van Riper echoed that, saying: “You can’t move wholesale money into different programs inside of the Pentagon, so say an airplane under development is a billion dollars short, you can’t reach around someplace else and get a billion dollars and move it over.”Ī former senior Pentagon official who spoke only on condition of anonymity said Defense Department money is authorized for specific uses and might be spent by specific agencies within the Homeland Security Department - but Congress still would have to move the money if it wasn’t originally authorized that way.
“But unspent money is hard to find,” and anything above double-digit millions has to be approved by Congress, Peters said. In one case, he recalled shifting unspent money from flying hours to some other account, but said the amount wasn’t large. Peters, the former Air Force secretary, said it isn’t uncommon for defense or service secretaries to reallocate small amounts of money to other programs within the Pentagon. Van Riper, a former commanding general of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, said the White House moved last week to sweep up unspent defense funding allocated to agencies or programs, to use for the border wall. Talking with senior aides last week, Trump noted the Defense Department was getting so much money as part of the spending package that the Pentagon surely could afford the border wall, two White House officials told the Post. The Post reported he’s since expressed regrets, saying it was a mistake and that he should have followed his instincts. Trump briefly threatened to veto the $1.3 trillion spending measure, but signed it last week, averting a government shutdown, and repeatedly lauded the military spending as “historic.”
Though he pushed hard for $25 billion for it in the last round of budget negotiations, but the $1.6 billion that resulted for fencing and flood control levees on the border well short of that. Trump campaigned on building a border wall and once claimed Mexico would pay for it.
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Peters, Van Riper and others who include Jacob Cohn, research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, agreed that small amounts of money can be moved between accounts, but anything rising into the billions would require Congress to intervene - a politically dicey situation for lawmakers who agreed to sharply increased defense funding to improve military readiness and would need to decide how to react if the Pentagon asked to move funds to meet a different set of priorities. “Just because he tweeted it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, not without Congress getting involved.” Paul Van Riper, known for serving as a mentor to Mattis. The president’s tweet “doesn’t mean anything in terms of what actually happens,” added retired Marine Lt. Whitten Peters, who served as secretary of the Air Force in the Clinton administration. “The money and the appropriations act, at least the current one … is specifically identified for projects like operations and maintenance and particular procurement accounts and things like that, and there is a limit, and the $25 billion he wants for the border wall is far above the limit that would require congressional approval,” said F. Congress, they said, would have to approve any such movement of the money. He raised the issue with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who offered little reaction to the idea, the paper said.ĭefense experts told the San Antonio Express-News late Tuesday that the Pentagon can’t reprogram money already allocated in a pair of budget blueprints that will raise military spending to $700 billion this year and $716 billion for the fiscal year that starts in October. The Washington Post reported that Trump had discussed the matter with Defense Secretary James Mattis and lawmakers on Capitol Hill in a private effort to seek military funding for the wall to augment $1.6 billion Congress had approved for it.
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