Norman D. Dicks: “Mr. Chairman, I want to try to see if I can provide some clarification. On most of the major weapons systems that we…”

“Mr. Chairman, I want to try to see if I can provide some clarification. On most of the major weapons systems that we fund in the Defense Department, like an aircraft carrier or the F-22, which is still an R&D program, we authorize all of the budget authority at one time. Therefore we have each year tremendous amounts of unobligated funds for those programs. If we looked at the Department of Defense, we would see there are a lot of unobligated funds. In this area there was adopted a procedure when George McMahon was chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. There was a concern that at the end of the fiscal year if Congress did not pass the budget, that some of these programs would be adversely affected. These are the crown jewels of our national technical means. We have a series of satellite programs that are funded on an incremental basis. One of the things we do not want to do is have them do what some agencies do, and that is rush at the end of the fiscal year to spend all the money. We have somewhere between 7 and 12 programs that have had various levels of unspent funds which added up to this total. We have no evidence whatsoever that any of this money was wrongly spent. The money would have ultimately been spent for each of these programs. The mistake of the NRO was not keeping Congress properly informed about the total of those carryforward funds. That is what we objected to, and we were very upset about it.”