Sen. Jack Reed
WASHINGTON: Two top Pentagon nominees sprinted through their nomination hearing today with bipartisan support from defense lawmakers.
Mike McCord, nominated to be the Pentagon’s comptroller, reprising a role he performed in the Obama Administration, and Ronald Moultrie, nominee for undersecretary for intelligence and security, faced no challenges to their records or reputation before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The only real pushback either nominee faced was McCord’s previous call for the defense budget to grow by 3-5% annually, a number the 2022 Biden defense budget won’t reach.
That number was “an appropriate resource range for the National Defense Strategy that Secretary Mattis laid out,” in 2018, he said, “if confirmed, my job would be to work with Secretary Austin as he undertakes his strategy review, and similarly, find the right resource level for his strategy.”
Austin has pledged to release an updated National Defense Strategy in 2022.
The SASC chairman, Sen. Jack Reed, threw an arrow at the 60 year-old method of constructing Pentagon budgets, known as the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process. In his opening statement, Reed said that the PPBE “ was first implemented in the McNamara era and may not be conducive to many of DoD’s requirements to adopt new technology in a rapid, agile manner to compete with China.”
In his written answers to questions, McCord appeared to disagree with the chairman: “If confirmed, I will work in partnership with the Deputy Secretary and other Department leaders to ensure that the PPBE process aligns resources to the defense strategy.”
The written answers, as usual, were general and stilted, but it appears clear that McCord isn’t envisioning any overhaul of the process, which could ultimately lead to confrontation with the powerful SASC chairman.
McCord also had to defend the Pentagon’s failed audits, and pledges by the Trump DoD that the building would be able to release a clean audit by 2028. He said he would have to get back into the building before he could confirm that date.
An audit is “not the answer to every question, certainly,” McCord added. “An audit won’t tell you whether the particular airplane you bought was the right plane for the mission, for example, or whether the contractor overcharged you. Those are all different aspects of control that are above and beyond the financial audit.”
