House committee ready to kill OCO account, calling it an 'abject failure'

摘要

Powerful House appropriators want to eliminate the Pentagon's controversial Overseas Contingency Operations account and return the department to annual supplemental funding requests, potentially sending defense officials scrambling to fill multibillion-dollar budget holes, according to documents obtained by Inside Defense. "The OCO experiment has been an abject failure and has given the department a budgetary relief valve that has allowed it to avoid making difficult decisions," the House Appropriations defense subcommittee says in a report set to accompany its version of the fiscal year 2021 defense spending bill. The OCO account, introduced in 2009 to fund U.S. conflicts in the Middle East and to give DOD flexibility to cover unexpected costs, has long been criticized as a military "slush fund." The OCO account, according to the appropriators, has been used for years to "circumvent" caps put in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act. Unlike the Defense Department's base budget, the OCO account is exempt from the BCA caps, leading DOD to annually place tens of billions of dollars in base budget expenses there yet remain compliant with the law. But the BCA caps expire in FY-22 and DOD needs to begin moving "OCO for base" spending back into the base budget.