NAVAIR Comptroller: ‘It Could Have Been Worse’
“It could have been worse,” NAVAIR Comptroller Jerry Short repeated quite a few times last week during a detailed layout of NAVAIR’s budget for FY14 and FY15.
NAVAIR Comptroller Jerry Short
“The Navy fared well,” he told more than a hundred contractors, government officials, and local media attending a Patuxent Partnership briefing on the NAVAIR budget. “Our products are in high demand.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Short made clear, there remain “a lot of moving parts,” even in the FY15 budget and there are no agreements at all on FY16. As for FY15, NAVAIR’s hit in the DoD-wide initiative to slash headquarter management by 20 percent is still under deliberation. Attrition here, at Pax River, will more than compensate civilian downsizing with a continued need for technical, engineering, and logistic hires. However, military contracting services will shrink further with an anticipated cut of $3 billion in FY15. That translates into a $1.2 billion contracting services cut at NAVAIR.
The reduction in contract services isn’t new. NAVAIR worked with 12,000 contractors in 2009; that number fell to 9,200 in FY13 and will reach 7,200 in FY15. The real “eye opener” regarding contracted services came for NAVAIR, Mr. Short said while responding to a question from the audience, was when a contractor-by-contractor review determined “89 cents on the dollar goes on contract.”
Eight-seven percent of that dollar goes to large corporations. VADM David Dunaway, Commander, Naval Air Systems Command elaborated on that point last month at another Patuxent Partnership briefing to regional political, academic and industry leaders. “We think it’s going to be real important to get control of things within the United States government that we have been abdicating out to large industry for a long time,” the admiral said. “There are a lot of areas we work on that that is absolutely the right thing to do and there’s a lot of areas we are inappropriately doing it and it is costing us a fortune.”
NAVAIR is slated to receive nearly $23 billion in the FY15 budget. If the president’s efforts to secure a $56 billion addition to the DoD budget are successful, NAVAIR could receive another $2.7 billion. That money would begin addressing the command’s unfunded priorities, Mr. Short explained, in upping purchases of aviation and weapons.
Though heralded as not as bad as it could have been, the budget is 18 percent less than the funding the Navy planned for in FY14. There are still losses from the FY13 budget that the FY15 is seeking to address. And there are no agreements regarding what FY16 will bring, Mr. Short said.
Heightening the budgeting challenges of funding uncertainty is the lurching nature of the budgeting process of recent years. It creates gaps between planning and execution. This risks “near-term readiness” and modernization. “It’s hard to plan,” Mr. Short said. “It is no longer an orderly, sequential budget process.”
