The continuing resolution may make it difficult to award the long-awaited KC-X tanker contract. But outside budget experts say there’s a small chance a loophole may exist. “There is something known as the Feed and Forage Act [that] allows the Defense Department to spend money in the advance of an appropriation,” said Stan Collender of Qorvis during the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ briefing on the forthcoming Fiscal 2012 budget Thursday in Washington, D.C. However, Todd Harrison, CSBA senior fellow, said “it would be tough to justify” using Feed and Forage for tanker procurement since the first new tanker won’t come online for at least several years. “It’s not directly related to the wars that we are in right now” and it wouldn’t immediately be “supporting the troops on the battlefield,” he explained. The department has invoked the obscure act only once in the past decade or so. That was immediately following 9/11.
The $4.26 billion Small Business Innovation Research contracting program widely used by the Air Force went into hibernation as the government shut down Oct. 1, but unless lawmakers strike a deal on reforms, the program could reach an abrupt end.
