The Department of Defense will unveil the Trump Administration’s Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) Defense budget request this week.
Seamus P. Daniels, Mark Cancian, Andrew Hunter, Thomas Karako, Wes Rumbaugh and Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) note that this marks the final budget submitted under the era of the discretionary spending limits imposed by the Budget Control Act, although the caps for FY 2021 were already raised by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019.
Following last year’s request, questions remain over the budget’s alignment with the National Defense Strategy. In this brief, experts from the CSIS International Security Program outline major issues to watch in the FY 2021 defense budget.
They note, among other things, that: “The [FY21 defense budget request] topline represents a 3 percent decrease in real terms from the $746 billion that was appropriated for national defense in FY 2020 (2 percent if the $8 billion in FY 2020 emergency funds is excluded). It is also $5.5 billion less than the funding the administration projected for FY 2021 in its FY 2020 request.”
