The Approval of the Draft Defense Budget in the US Congress

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Table of Contents

Budget Discussion
Timely Review Factors
Concluding Points
References

Budget Discussion

It is worth noting that budget approval is a complex process that requires compliance with a certain procedure, regardless of whether it will be considered as part of the defense budget or not. In order to understand what measures are necessary for a timely review, it should be emphasized that this process consists of four essential stages. They include the preparation of the military budget, consideration and adoption of it by Congress, execution of the federal budget, drawing up a report on budget execution, and its approval by Congress. The budget year begins in the fall, as described in the prompt (Committee on the Budget U.S. House of Representatives, 2008).

Previously, the Intelligence Community (IC) submitted its budget request directly to Congress due to the fact that, before that there was no single federal budget in the form of a well-thought-out and carefully-developed financial plan. There was no single budget that would be based on the coordinated spending needs of the federal government.

Timely Review Factors

However, some time ago, the government started to draw up the US budget as a single financial plan, which allowed standardizing the processes. In order for the Intelligence Community to be able to include its request, it is necessary to observe the sequence (Keith & Heniff, 2005). The preparation of the draft budget should begin with the preparation of documents that will contain detailed financial information, control figures for the consideration by ministries and departments in their estimates, as well as the establishment of deadlines for their submission.

The control figures should be submitted to the agency before the start of the fiscal year as the main guide in the preparation of their budget applications for the planned year. After Intelligence submits its information, the process of discussing the budget in various committees and subcommittees of the highest legislative body of the United States will begin (Lowenthal, 2017). The discussion will be held in three stages – determining the goals of fiscal policy, authorizing the implementation of IC programs, and accepting bills.

The main difficulty is that even if the community submits its initiatives and budget for consideration in a timely manner, the possibility of not approving the budget on time remains. This is due to the fact that Congress has the right to refine the initiative and may revise the draft budget. Congress determines the number of budget expenditures in each financial year (Schick, 2007). It only approves the authority, in accordance with each of the funds that are allocated for specific intelligence programs (Schick, 2007). For this reason, the Intelligence Community needs to provide information in a timely manner so that the Director can determine how the numbers coincide with the capabilities and have a clear understanding of how defense costs should be shared.

Concluding Points

Thus, in order to achieve a timely review of the Intelligence activities embedded in the Defense budget, the intelligence projects need to be prepared and confirmed in advance and pass approval in the Senate of Congress. An agreement can be reached earlier, the main aspect is that the core areas of financing should be planned and justification needs to be provided on what the main expenses are oriented. The approval of the draft Defense budget in the US Congress will be processed without a delay only when all the processes are debugged.

References

Committee on the Budget U.S. House of Representatives. (2008). Compilation of laws and rules relating to the Congressional budget process. U.S. Government Printing Office. Web.

Keith, R., & Heniff, B. (2005). The budget reconciliation process: House and Senate procedures. Congressional Research Service.

Lowenthal, M. M. (2017). The future of Intelligence. John Wiley & Sons.

Schick, A. (2007). The federal budget: Politics, policy, process (3^rd ed.). Brookings Institution Press.

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The Approval of the Draft Defense Budget in the US Congress

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