In defense of the military’s unfunded priority lists

The knives are out for the Defense Department’s unfunded priority lists—sometimes called the service branch “wish lists” because they contain items not included in the president’s annual budget request to Congress. But to end the practice would undermine lawmakers’ oversight of America’s armed forces by removing an opportunity for politicians to hear straight from those in uniform.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last year, a group of legislators called for repealing these annual lists, citing concerns about waste, abuse, and budgetary gamesmanship. Secretary Austin has also signaled his openness to nixing the lists, which isn’t a surprise. After months of painstaking analysis, negotiation, and strategy alignment, telling Congress about items that hit the budget-cutting room floor can seem like a challenge to a leader’s carefully crafted priorities.

But this tension is precisely why military unfunded priority lists are so valuable. They bypass the Pentagon’s bureaucratic filters to offer unvarnished assessments of strategic, operational, and tactical risks that might otherwise be obscured. Far from being “wish lists” of unneeded military capabilities, UPLs are better understood as “risk lists” that offer Congress and the public a clearer view of the tradeoffs buried in Pentagon budget decisions.

Each year, executive-branch agencies—including the largest, the Pentagon—prepare and submit their budget requests to the White House and then to Congress. This final product often obscures the assumptions, rationales, and hard choices that produced it. This is why UPLs are valuable. By requiring commanders to submit lists that reveal their own organizational priorities—not just the ones picked by political appointees—Congress can glean valuable insights into the highest-risk areas of defense-spending choices.

For example, the Navy’s 2025 UPL included $580 million to fund a damaged helicopter squadron hanger and $600 million for repairs for breakwater facilities on Guam. These were left out of the budget request, but their presence in the UPL underscores the estimated $50 billion in damages from a hurricane and an even longer list of an estimated $180 billion in deferred maintenance.

A Constitutional responsibility

Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This is the clause that gives Congress the exclusive “power of the purse” and the final say on how taxpayer dollars are spent. Given the immensity of that task, Congress should have as much insight, advice, and access to quality information as possible, especially when it comes to national security.

Additionally, every senior military leader is asked during their confirmation process whether they will present the legislative branch with their best professional military judgment, even if they do not agree with the president or other leaders. Budgetary decisions are not exempt from this crucial provision of sharing information with elected leaders on Capitol Hill. 

Unfunded requests have been around in some form or another since the 1980s, though recent legislation has widened their scope and necessity.

Though some critics call UPLs an example of government waste, they represent a tiny fraction of federal spending and, if approved, are subject to the same rules and oversight as any appropriated funds. In fiscal 2025, the Pentagon released 17 of these requests, whose total value of $29.4 billion amounted to 3.5 percent of the President’s $850 billion request for the Pentagon, and just 0.4 percent of total federal $7.3 trillion request.

Critics also often accuse Pentagon top brass of abusing these additional requests as an act of budget gamesmanship. The ploy, they say, is that military leaders excise key service priorities from the base defense budget, betting Congress will bump up their budgets for the needed purchases. This can be rebutted by a look at fiscal 2024, when commanders submitted $16.9 billion in unfunded priority lists requests. Instead of heaping these billions on top of the President’s topline, Congress made tweaks around the edges. The final appropriation bill saw just a $160 million difference from the president’s request, meaning 99 percent of the additional dollars in the unfunded priority lists did not appear in final appropriations.

Source: Conference report on the fiscal year (FY) 2024 MILCON/VA Appropriations bill, Conference report on the FY 2024 Defense Appropriations bill, and AEI's 2023 report "Defense Budget: The Storied Unfunded Priorities Lists". Dollars in billions.

Critics should recognize that unfunded priority lists are information, not mandates. Lawmakers can choose simply to ignore them—and in fact, often do. There is simply no pressing need to repeal a law that provides legislators with more detailed information about the federal agency that is both the largest and whose core function is at the heart of why the government exists. Congress should instead protect its prerogative to conduct deep oversight and continue to allow commanders to highlight risk in defense budget insufficiency and in critical areas of investment excluded from annual White House requests.

Mackenzie Eaglen, John Ferrari, and Elaine McCusker are senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute.