A spokesperson says the request is not the result of sequestration. Pentagon asks to shift $9.6 billion

The Defense Department began forwarding documents to Congress late Friday seeking to shift as much as $9.6 billion within its budget to cope with what it said were large shortfalls in overseas contingency funds related to Afghanistan.

The massive reprogramming is larger than the $7.5 billion cap set by Congress for annual transfers between accounts. But the Pentagon said only $7.3 billion actually applied to that statutory limit and the remainder could be moved by tapping other transfer authorities available to the department.


About $1 billion, largely to pay for fuel costs, would be moved under transfers related to a working capital fund. To fill the remaining gap, DOD is apparently also tapping into transfer authorities it has under the so-called “foreign currency fluctuations account.”

How all this will sit with Congress is not certain yet. The very size of the transfers pose a challenge for the Appropriations and Armed Services Committees which must review and sign off on the requests, which are sure to entail taking money away from priority programs lawmakers have supported in the past.

The “foreign currency fluctuations account” is described as a bank of sorts allowing DOD to deal — as the name suggests— with changes in currency rates overseas. How that fits in this reprogramming is not yet clear, but one long-time veteran of the defense appropriations process expressed surprise at its inclusion.

The DOD requests came Friday even as several domestic departments and agencies were also seeking their own transfers to cope with the fallout from budget cuts March 1 ordered under sequestration.

The Department of Homeland Security, for example, will be seeking to move about $400 million to avoid furloughs of critical personnel, such as Border Patrol and Secret Service agents. NOAA wants to move $47 million to help protect National Weather Service operations.

But DOD, the very largest, insisted that its requests have little to do with sequestration. “These actions are designed primarily to offset large shortfalls in Overseas Contingency Operations funding and unanticipated fuel bills, not to offset the effects of sequestration,” said a DOD spokesperson.

The Pentagon is allowed under statute to move up to $4 billion within its base budget and $3.5 billion from the contingency or OCO funds. In this case, the spokesperson said, a total of $7.3 billion of this transfer authority will be consumed by this reprogramming. But the remaining $2.3 would then come from “other authorities, including the authority to transfer funds from the Foreign Currency Fluctuations, Defense account.”