As Vice President Biden and others have noted, at some point America’s strength and leadership will be diminished by the burden of American debt.   We cannot go on as we are.  A key focus of PNSR’s work is about achieving fiscal responsibility through national security reform.  It includes allocating resources toward crosscutting national security issues and creating a unified national security budget.  This will help address waste from strategically marginal projects, duplication, and fragmentation.    

It took Richard Clarke, counterterrorism czar, two years to design a budget display showing the money the government allocated toward its complete counterterrorism operations, and even then, he had no authority over the funds.  That budget display is no longer in use – in the current system, funding is distributed program by program, department by department. In theory, this is designed to produce desired mission outcomes. In practice, however, the process focuses on means rather than ends, creating waste, duplication, and programs working in cross-purposes.

On this issue, PNSR is collaborating with other groups advocating fiscal responsibility.