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 rate of building B-21 bombers would speed up if the fiscal 2026 defense budget passes. But it remains unclear how much capacity would be added, and whether the Air Force would simply build the bombers faster, or buy more.
