Crs Report for Congress

In recent years a number of observers and practitioners have identified various facets of U.S. government national security practice-decision-making, strategy-making, budgeting, planning and execution, and congressional oversight-as inherently "cross-cutting." They have in mind arenas-such as counterterrorism, and stabilization and reconstruction-that by definition involve multiple agencies, or for which responsibilities could be divided up in any number of ways among various agencies. For such facets of national security, they argue, the U.S. government is seldom able to conduct genuinely holistic consideration. The cost, they add, is a loss of effectiveness, or efficiency, or both. In order to encourage holistic consideration of national security issues, some members of this inchoate school have called for the use of "unified national security budgeting" (UNSB). To be clear, their goal is not to refine the U.S. federal system of budgeting, but rather to use budgetary mechanisms to drive changes in U.S. national security practices. Within this broad school of thought, various proponents call for the adoption of a number of different approaches, from a single shared funding pool for all national security activities, to mission-specific funding pools, to crosscut displays, to more strategically driven budgeting. In turn, various proponents apparently aim to achieve quite different kinds of change with their proposed remedies-from rebalancing the distribution of roles and responsibilities among executive branch agencies, to saving money, to revisiting fundamental understandings about how U.S. national security is best protected.