A Wartime Budget Meets a Peacetime Congress: What Congress Should Learn from the FY27 Unfunded Priorities List : American Enterprise Institute , May 14 , 2026
A Wartime Budget Meets a Peacetime Congress: What Congress Should Learn from the FY27 Unfunded Priorities List : American Enterprise Institute , May 14 , 2026
From the report: "For years, the Pentagon’s unfunded priorities lists (UPLs) functioned as annual warnings to Congress. After the president submitted the defense budget, the military services and combatant commands would provide lawmakers with lists of programs, military construction projects, readiness accounts, and operational needs left unfunded inside the administration’s request. In many years, these lists, totaled by fiscal year in Table 1, revealed more about strategic risk than the budget itself.
The authors have long argued that UPLs matter because they expose the gap between strategy and resources. Historically, they showed a Pentagon forced into painful tradeoffs: modernization versus readiness, current operations versus future force structure, or personnel costs versus procurement. But the FY 2027 UPLs are different."
Authors - McCusker, Elaine, Ferrari, John G.Subjects
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