Charles E. Grassley: “I want to visit for just a short period of time about the budget problems at the Department of Defense, and what they…”

“I want to visit for just a short period of time about the budget problems at the Department of Defense, and what they say they are going to be able to do with their being overprogrammed for the amount of money that they are going to receive from the Congress over the next several years. That amount of money is a large, what I call a ``negative,'' funding wedge that they have to make up. They say they can do it easily. But I do not think they are going to do it very easily. Earlier I gave a speech updating my colleagues about the budget. I did it as an after-action report on the budget issues that Senator Exon and I presented to this body, and we ended up in the process with saving the taxpayers $13 billion. It was not quite as much as we had hoped for when we got a $26 billion amendment through here. But since the House did not do anything on it, saving $13 billion is a pretty good move, and at least it is better than rubberstamping what the President proposed to do. Today, I want to provide my colleagues an after-action report on another budget issue. This is what I just described about the defense budget in the overprogramming in that defense budget. I want to focus on what I call a plans/reality mismatch in that defense budget. In brief, the issue is whether the Pentagon's projected funding in the future year defense program exceeds the administration's proposed budget, and it does. It is overprogrammed.”