Today's Quote

Is from pages 273-78 of James E. Hewes, Jr.'s "From Root to McNamara: Army Organization and Administration" http://www.history.army.mil/books/root/

"Technical service chiefs could and did transfer funds freely among their various activities, functions, and installations, but neither the Secretary nor the General Staff could legally transfer funds among the several technical services or other staff agencies without going to Congress for approval."

That was before passage of the 1949 amendment to the National Security Act. Title IV instituted the first "performance budget," or program budget that is the prototype of the Planning-Programming-Budgeting-Execution System (PPBES) in use today. It was the brainchild of Ferdinand Eberstadt and Wilfred J. McNeil, the latter becoming Assistant Secretary of Defense(Comptroller), for the next decade. 

Hewes goes on:

"With this one directive McNeil wiped out the independent budgets of the technical services dating back in some instances to the Revolution. The chiefs no longer would defend their budgets before Congress. Instead this would be the responsibility of the several General Staff divisions. Congressional restrictions on transferring funds among appropriations would hamstring the technical services rather than the General Staff."

Before 1949, the budget was controlled by independent heads of different Army organizations, providing competition and diversity -- particularly in the technical services which performed weapons procurement. Afterwards, it was to be organized centrally from Army staff under the authority of the Secretary of Defense and his Comptroller.

Perhaps the most pernicious part of it all, the performance budget controlled not just the flow of dollars, but the precise objectives those dollars were to accomplish. No longer could a project manager decide to take alternative approaches to new technologies on his own authority, and contract freely with industry.