Costs of the CR: Marines will miss full strength, and more

The military is undercut in various ways by Congress’ failure to pass a defense budget this far into the fiscal year—even if the stopgap funding bill passed in the wee hours of Saturday morning avoided a costlier government shutdown.

The Marine Corps will miss its full authorized strength by the equivalent of a regiment because of the CR, Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said earlier this month. 

“We will not meet our end strength goals,” Smith said.

The commandant is just one of many defense officials who have warned about the negative effects of continuing resolutions, which are passed to allow the Defense Department and other federal agencies to continue operating when formal appropriations have not been enacted. They generally hold expenditures at last year’s levels, prevent new program starts, and can snarl defense planning and operations. Congress passed a continuing resolution just before fiscal 2025 began on Oct.1. It expired on Dec. 21 but was replaced by another CR that will expire on March 14.

Speaking at the Reagan National Security Forum earlier this month, Smith explained how the CR hurts re-enlistment efforts. 

“We have Marines who have stepped up to reenlist. We've offered them bonuses to reenlist,” he said. If those bonuses don’t come or can’t be offered, Marines will look elsewhere before signing up again. “They expect to have that promise completed. Their families expect to have that promise completed and when it's not, then they tend to look elsewhere.” 

The result, he said: “We'll lose 3,000 or 4,000 people, and that is an entire infantry regiment, and we can't afford to do that.”

In acquisition, a CR costs some $2 billion a month because it delays the start of new programs and initiatives, according to Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif.

“We can't afford to continue to operate in this matter,” said Calvert, who leads the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel. 

The CR would also reduce the incoming Trump administration’s ability to meet its objectives, he said: “This is going to slow down the administration in their first 100 days because they're going to be caught up in this.”

Others said the loss of time hurts even more than the money.

“Going six months [without a passed budget] is incredibly debilitating. It's inefficient. It does not allow us to ramp up programs we need to ramp up. It does not allow us to increase production. We're essentially giving away our most precious asset, which is time. So I can't say enough about the negative effects of CR,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Thursday at a Mitchell Institute event.

A Defense Department official speaking in September echoed that point. 

“No amount of funding can make up for lost time," the official said. "A shutdown impacts our ability to outcompete the PRC [People's Republic of China] — it costs us time as well as money, and money can't buy back time, especially for lost training events." 

And yet CRs have increasingly become standard operating procedure. Congress last passed a budget on time in 1996.

Audrey Decker contributed to this post.