Projects generally sought by far-flung Defense establishment or by contractor or university
The House-passed Defense appropriations bill would add $10.7 billion into these weapons accounts for 580 different programs. The Senate’s companion measure contains nearly $15 billion inserted by senators for an almost completely different set of 636 weapons projects, according to the Taxpayers for Common Sense database.
If history is a guide, the two sets of increases will mostly just be added together in the final bill, which appropriators hope to finish writing by early February, when the Defense Department’s funding under the current stopgap spending bill expires.
The beneficiaries of the fiscal 2024 funding increases for defense research and procurement include some programs netting hundreds of millions each — such as $1.2 billion in the Senate bill to start building a destroyer ahead of the Navy’s schedule or $675 million in the House bill to procure V-22 tiltrotor aircraft than the Navy did not seek.
But most of the unrequested programs cost in the single-digit millions of dollars and go to research initiatives at labs, contractors and other installations across the country. They are described only briefly in the committee reports, buried in funding tables, using arcane phrases such as “refractory metal alloys for hypersonics” and “ion trap quantum computing.”