Defense contractors would not get much reimbursement for the costs of responding to COVID-19 in the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act briefed this week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which wants appropriators to handle that work.
The $740-billion legislation, approved by the committee Wednesday, authorizes some $45 million in COVID-19 “for vaccine and biotechnology research supported by DOD.” Aside from that, the Armed Services Committee steered clear of any heavy lifting on the issue in the latest version of the annual defense policy and spending-limits bill.
COVID-19 relief was “one of those aspects that we, at least some of us … assume would be in the next major COVID bill,” committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said during a telephone conference call with the press to discuss the NDAA. “That’s one reason I think we should move very quickly to taking up a new COVID bill as soon as we can. The other possibility would be, within the Appropriations committees, of emergency supplemental funding that would be directed to the Department of Defense for COVID-related industrial base issues.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) does not want to pass another big COVID-19 bill, as many Democrats do. The election-minded senator of 35 years has cited concerns about deficit spending, claiming he wants to understand the effect of the $2 trillion the CARES Act started pumping into the economy in late March. Congress has passed four major pieces of COVID-19 legislation so far, with the CARES Act by far the largest.
Reed and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) spoke to reporters a day after the Pentagon’s top acquisition official told the House Armed Services Committee that defense contractors need “double digits of billions of dollars” in bailout money to cover the cost of keeping the defense-industrial base operating safely as COVID-19 spread across the country.
Section 3610 of CARES Act coronavirus relief package authorized the Pentagon to cover the defense industrial base’s efforts to keep workers employed, but did not appropriate funds for reimbursements, Lord noted.
“While the department may be able to use other appropriated funds to reimburse contractors, the cost for [Section] 3610 is likely well beyond the department’s resourced ability to do so without significantly jeopardizing modernization or readiness,” Lord said.
Lord said the department would need to request funding in a subsequent funding bill, and that industry would likely wait to submit claims until money for reimbursements was appropriated.
On Thursday, Inhofe said he had not talked to Lord about the cost of the defense industrial base’s COVID-19 response.
“I have a lot of respect though for her, and would say that very likely, anything that she would recommend would be, should be taken seriously and is something that I most likely would support,” Inhofe told reporters.
Parts of this story first appeared in Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
