Beginning in mid- to late-March each year, the news starts to include talk of the Services sending to Congress their Unfunded Priority List, or UPL. Sometimes this submission is referred to as the Unfunded Requirements list, or UFR (commonly pronounced “you-fer”) or “wish list”. This list describes defense and intelligence-related priorities that were not included in the President’s annual budget request.

The Army Guard and Air Guard develop their budgets over a year in advance, and then submit them to their parent Service (Army and Air Force). The budget request includes money for pay and allowances, operations and maintenance, facilities construction, and research. The parent Service then scrubs their request and rolls the submission into their budget request and forwards it to the Department of Defense (DOD) for submission in their request. DOD does another scrub and puts together an overall budget and submits it to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). OMB and DOD go back and forth on what will stay and what will be cut from the budget request, and eventually the final product goes to Congress as the annual Presidential Budget Request (PBR) (not a rodeo but some have described it as such).

Obviously, some items in the original budget submission by the Army and Air Guard will fall on the cutting floor and are excluded from the budget process. Those items tend to wind up on the Unfunded Priorities List.

For the Fiscal Year 2025 budget submission, the Chief National Guard Bureau identified and sent to Congress a UPL worth $2.662 billion. The UPL for the Guard includes $1.35 billion for six more F15EX and six more F35A aircraft; $80 million for more Army Guard recruiters and $110 million for more Air Guard full time manning; and $177 million for more constructing more facilities, to name a few. You can find the Chief’s UPL here: https://www.ngaus.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/NGAUS%20FY25%20CNGB%20UPL.pdf.

Congress has noted that many Reserve Component requirements go unfunded by the parent Services in the President’s Budget request.  In 1981, Congress created a separate equipment appropriation for the Reserve Components from the President’s Budget submission entitled the Dedicated Procurement Program (DPP) which is now known as the National Guard and Reserve Equipment Appropriation or NGREA. The Congress intended NGREA to supplement the Services’ budget requests to provide for investments in Reserve Component equipment which do not meet the prioritization threshold for inclusion in the President Budget submission. The Congress typically appropriates funding in lump-sum amounts to be used for aircraft and miscellaneous equipment. Since its inception in 1981, the Army Guard received $13.4 billion and the Air Guard received $10.2 billion in NGREA funding. Average NGREA funding for the Army Guard is $624 million per year, and average for the Air Guard is $486 million per year.

Many Guard readiness needs are met each year through NGREA funding. EANGUS will continue to engage with Congressional leaders and staff to ensure the Guard continues to enjoy NGREA funding to meet critical needs of the Guard.