An Outsider's Perspective

[Umar Al-Mokhtār]

What I don't know is whether OMB reviews and contrasts government department budget proposals for redundancy prior to including them in the President's budget request to Congress. Are competing priorities considered, or does OMB just rubber stamp them?

I would venture to say probably not. The Service POMs are pretty extensively scrubbed for redundancies, overlaps, and gaps; usually in the search for savings and offsets to pay bills while not exceeding TOA. That's why the second P of PPBE is important. OSD tends to ignore it in their budget submission; it's more of submit the previous year's budget adjusted for inflation. I’ve found there is little comprehensive programmatic scrubbing of OSD PEs. The COCOMS are also not necessarily held to the same level of scrutiny by being compared across the board with the other COCOMs. So I'm pretty confident that OMB doesn't have a "murder board" that cross-matches DoD with other Government entities to optimize national security capabilities across the enterprise.

Ron, your point that elected reps fund validated requirements leads me to consider resourcing national security in broader terms.

That is so true it's not even funny. It's part of the reason our present budgeting system is broken. We feed the beast and make it fatter yet rarely make attempts to trim it down through a comprehensive look at enterprise wide redundancies, overlaps, and gaps.