Today the Pentagon is working, sensibly, on another flexible instrument it has to move funds around in those operating accounts and reset those priorities: reprogramming. Every year, Congress provides DOD with a set amount of funds it can reprogram to other purposes -- so-called General Transfer Authority (GTA). This year, it amounts to $4 billion. Congress has also provided another $3.5 billion in transfer authority in the Overseas Contingency Operations accounts.
So that makes a total of $7.5 billion DOD can move around, as long as it notifies its key committees it intends to do so, unless they have a strong objection. There is a major reprogramming notification coming this month, eating up almost all of that ceiling but turning another piece of the sequester Doomsday into a whimper.
It is not an easy task to find the sources for this reprogramming, because "sources" must be found to provide the funds the Pentagon wants to add to key operating programs. So the "scrub" is on to find those sources and maybe the Navy and the Air Force will have to pony up some operating fund "give backs" to fix the most serious operating fund problems, which are largely in the Army budget (including underestimating war operations costs).
But the scavenger hunt for offsets is well underway, and found they will be. No other federal agency has as big a pot of sources for the hunt as the Pentagon has, even more so because of the significant growth over the past 10 years in DOD's "back office," the administrative overhead.
Even that is not all. Every year the Pentagon reprograms significant sums of money at levels that fall below the congressional reporting requirement for General Transfer Authority. In fact, between FY 2000 and FY 2011, they reprogrammed nearly $175 billion, or an average of over $14 billion a year. In FY 2008, between GTA and below-the-threshold reprogramming, DOD managed to move nearly $50 billion in all, no doubt a good deal of that inside the operating accounts.
This is not as easy to do today because we are in a defense drawdown and the sources are getting scarcer. In the heady days of the last decade, finding the bill-payers was a piece of cake; today, it takes some scratching.
But what is interesting about all of this is that, for all the difficulties of dealing with a deep reduction like the sequester, it is the Pentagon that has, relatively, the easiest task and the greatest flexibility, compared to the rest of the executive branch. And it was the Pentagon that was leading the parade toward Doomsday.
In the end, this flexibility is a good thing. Not because it is fun, but because it is bringing some discipline to a department the budget of which grew beyond control over the past decade. And good, because the sequester seems likely to be with us all year, bar an unlikely general agreement on the federal budget. Sequestration, it seems, is a kind of deus ex machina, a "God-like" appearance from the sky, lowering the federal budget with no one to blame.
The Defense Department will get through it, not unscathed, but not rendered helpless by any account. Given its flexibility, and, truthfully, its planning capabilities, it may be more successful than other departments.
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