After a brief government shutdown, Congress finally passed the $839B Defense Appropriations bill! What does this new budget mean for startups? In our newest Techquisition Edition of the Mission Matters podcast (link in comments), David and I sit down with former HAC-D staff director Johnnie Kaberle to discuss how startups can best take advantage of the opportunities presented new FY26 Approps bill.
We cover:
How the Appropriations Bill, NDAA, President’s Budget Request, and the reconciliation (the “one big, beautiful bill”) fit together – and where the real funding signal lives
How startups should engage Congress to advocate for their technology without burning credibility
What next-generation technologies (AI, autonomy, space, maritime, digital infrastructure) are actually funded in the bill
The importance of the Joint Explanatory Statement (JES) to understand appropriators’ intent behind the bill
How to tell whether a budget line is real, available, and competitive, or already spoken for
How appropriators think about risk, flexibility, and accountability with taxpayer dollars.
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, the Shield Capital website, or right here on Substack.
As always, please let us know what you think. And please reach out if you or anyone you know is building at the intersection of technology and national security.
Transcript
Maggie 00:39
On this episode of the Techquisition Edition of the Mission Matters Podcast, we’re joined by Johnnie Kaberle to break down the fiscal year 26 appropriations bill and what it means for startups.
David 01:09
This podcast was originally recorded on January 26, prior to the brief government shutdown and the subsequent congressional compromise that removed the Department of Homeland Security funding bill from the broader appropriations package.
Maggie 01:22
Johnnie is an expert in the world of defense appropriations. She’s currently a senior vice president at West Exec, a well-established government relations firm. Prior to joining West Exec, she served for a number of years as the staff director for the House Appropriations Committee for Defense, also known as HAC-D.
David 01:41
All right, Maggie, before we bring Johnnie on, I think we should level set for our founders listening. Because anytime we say “appropriations bill,” eyes naturally glaze over immediately.
Maggie 01:54
Yeah, this is definitely one of those bills that everyone hears about in one form or another. Everybody knows it’s important. Everybody knows it can lead to things like government shutdowns. But almost no one is totally sure what it actually does, how it comes into being, and how it relates to all these other important documents like the President’s budget request, the National Defense Authorization Act, the reconciliation bill, et cetera. To be fair, it is a 1,000-plus-page document, so it really does quite a lot.
David 02:26
So at a basic level, the appropriations bill is how Congress actually gives the executive branch permission to spend money. Each department, of which there are 12, will receive its own funding bill. Examples include, in addition to the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, Department of Labor, Veterans Affairs, as well as the legislative branch, which also depends on funding bills to operate. All the strategies, modernization priorities, and budget requests in the world don’t matter if the money isn’t appropriated.
Maggie 02:57
That’s right. As you might have learned from Schoolhouse Rock, or back in civics class, this is really Congress exercising its power of the purse. And for founders, this is more than just a policy document. It is one of the strongest demand signals the government puts out about what they are actually planning to buy. It tells you where Congress is comfortable putting real dollars behind a mission.
David 03:21
And context matters a lot this year, because last year we were operating under a full-year continuing resolution. Congress was not able to pass a new budget, which basically meant everything was frozen at the previous fiscal year’s funding levels.
Maggie 03:37
So that means that for the past two years, we’ve been operating with a budget tied to government priorities convened all the way back in 2023, which feels like a really long time ago. It seems like a lot has happened since then, right?
David 03:50
You are, Maggie. I think you might have still been in graduate school. But beyond the funding levels, which were tied to decisions made a long time ago, operating under a continuing resolution, or CR, means no new programs that were previously unanticipated in 2023 can begin without explicit approval. I would say this has wreaked havoc on the innovation ecosystem. So when we look at the fiscal year 26 appropriations bill, we’re not just asking what’s in it, but how it’s evolving and what that evolution tells founders about where the system is actually headed.
Maggie 04:23
We’re going to dig into things founders don’t usually hear explained clearly, like how lobbying actually shows up in bill language and why committees like HAC-D and SAC-D, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees for Defense, matter way more than most startups realize.
David 04:39
And we’ll talk about those big, headline-grabbing legislative packages, like the big, beautiful bill, how they fit into this whole process, and how much of that is real acquisition signal versus political noise.
Maggie 04:52
All right, let’s bring Johnnie in. Johnnie, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the Techquisition Edition of the Mission Matters Podcast. You are officially our first external subject matter expert. There’s probably no one better to help us demystify the appropriations bill and help us and our founders understand its value, as well as how they should be thinking about their own government relations strategy to influence and take advantage of the opportunities presented in these kinds of bills.
David 05:24
But first, please tell us a bit about yourself. We know you’re currently at West Exec, a well-established government relations firm, and we know that you were the staff director, as Maggie highlighted. What else should our listeners understand about your experience dealing with the appropriations bill?
Johnnie 05:40
First, David and Maggie, thank you so much for having me on. I have been really looking forward to this. In the year since I left Capitol Hill, my favorite thing has been explaining how appropriations works to people on the outside, because appropriations is really fun when you understand it. I retired after 30 years and 10 months last January, and I actually had a pretty unique background, even by Capitol Hill standards. I worked in personal offices for a variety of members of Congress. I also worked in the whip office in Republican leadership, and then served as the deputy staff director of the entire Appropriations Committee, covering all 12 bills. But my passion, and where I ended up at the end, was as staff director of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
David 06:28
Well, I must say, you know, Johnnie, as we talked earlier before the recording, that this is kind of your first formal podcast out into the ether, and I’m just putting it out there for other podcast hosts: you should definitely bring Johnnie on to your episode. We’re going to focus on founders and the appropriations bill as it lies today, but man, your stories that we were talking about, just a little bit of them, they were incredible. Yeah.
Maggie 06:55
So, Johnnie, top level, what are some of the major highlights that you noticed in this year’s Defense Appropriations Bill? What are some maybe notable new initiatives and funding lines that weren’t present in past bills that people should be paying attention to? Well, I’ll—
Johnnie 07:11
Talk bigger picture. And I think that, again, my passion, and it comes from my previous boss, Chairman Calvert, is the innovation and the pushing of that. Many people get authorization and appropriations confused. And for the founders, what’s important to understand is authorizing without appropriating is just a policy statement. You could get authorized exactly everything you want, but if you don’t get any money for it, is that a win?
Maggie 07:39
And John, maybe could you talk to what even is authorizing?
Johnnie 07:43
So authorizing is giving the permission, giving permission for end strength, giving permission for, let’s say, F-35s or those type of things. However, and I always ask people I do a lot of speaking to, like graduate classes, if the authorizers authorize 90 F-35s and the appropriators fund 100, how many F-35s do you get? One hundred. If they fund two, how many do you get? Two. And so that’s why it’s really important. A lot of founders will relax when they see the authorization bill come out, where, again, if you’re only looking for permission, fantastic, but if money matters, you’ve got to wait for the appropriation.
David 08:26
Real quick, why then do the authorizers even put in a funding table, and how does that interact with the appropriators? Does it influence it in any form or fashion, or are they sort of operating in separate universes?
Johnnie 08:43
I would say, I’m trying to be politically correct, but I still gotta be me. They put a table in so that people can understand what the authorizers’ priorities are, but that doesn’t correspond with funding. Especially if you look at the timing of the bills, we don’t see their tables before other people see their tables. And by “we,” I’m sorry, I still go back into my defense role. The appropriators don’t see that. Staff will talk about priorities and bosses’ priorities and look at the funding levels, but no, the appropriators are not just taking the authorizers’ funding tables and funding them.
Maggie 09:25
Maybe it’d be helpful to actually talk through how the defense appropriations bill comes into being. How does Congress know what the military wants and needs, and how does the appropriations bill and that process relate to the President’s budget request and the J-books, which are supposed to come out earlier in the year to help the appropriators? And just to clarify for listeners, the President’s budget request is the administration’s annual proposal to Congress outlining the President’s funding priorities and plans for the upcoming fiscal year, but of course it’s just a request. Ultimately, Congress is in charge of actually funding those priorities. The President’s budget request is accompanied by the justification books, or J-books, which provide detailed, program-by-program explanations of how requested funds would be spent. They typically include budget rationale, performance metrics, prior year execution, and future plans, and they’re meant to be the primary documents that Congress and congressional staff use to evaluate, question, and modify DoD funding requests. So given all these documents and all these different stakeholders, what does it take to actually get the appropriations bill written and passed?
Johnnie 10:39
So one thing I want to put into context before I start this is the amount of staff. David had mentioned there are 12 subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee. When I was staff director of defense, I had the largest staff of any subcommittee, and that was only 14. And so the defense appropriations bill covers the Department of War, all the military services, and the entire intelligence community. If you were to compare that to our authorizing brothers and sisters, HASC has about 60 staff and the Intelligence Committee has about 60 staff. So we have 14 to 120, just to put that into context. When the President’s budget comes out, there are a lot of budget briefings. There are J-books, though this year, I don’t know how they did it, but the House appropriators had to write their bill without having any of those justifications, which is just amazing that they were even able to pull that off. They go through line by line. They go through the budget request. They have briefings. I know David was one who used to get to give those briefings to the Hill. They ask for specific data, and numbers matter. Numbers really matter to appropriators, because they don’t want to spend money on things that we’re not going to get. They don’t want to fund “hope so.” If they’re looking at how programs perform, and you got X amount of money last year for something and you underperformed, it’s unlikely you’re going to get that much money, or you might even get some money rescinded from the previous year.
David 12:12
Yeah, so those are all good points. And Johnnie, I’m getting a little bit of PTSD thinking about my time at the Pentagon briefing out my program, which I think you’ll appreciate, was $5 billion over the fiscal year. Defense planning, right, the five-year fight, with zero validated requirements. So you can imagine how well that went. Well, you had a lot of fun. You made a lot of friends. I made a lot of friends. Took a lot of cuts. But yeah, specific to fiscal year 26, what were some things that stood out to you? Was there anything in there of true note, and maybe somewhat related to some of the executive branch directives and memos that have been coming out, and whether or not the appropriators are picking up what the executive branch is putting down?
Johnnie 13:04
Well, I think that probably one of the most important areas to look at in the defense appropriations bill that most people skip over and just do a word search on is what we were talking with Maggie about earlier, which is the joint explanatory statement.
Maggie 13:18
And just to clarify for listeners, the joint explanatory statement, often referred to as the JESS, is a document issued by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees that essentially accompanies the final appropriations bill. You can basically think of it as a user manual for how Congress expects the executive branch, in this case the Department of Defense, to execute the appropriations bill, really explaining in plain English Congress’s intent behind the funding decisions written into the bill.
Johnnie 13:49
As we talked about, appropriators like numbers. We don’t use words unless we have to, and so if it’s written there, it really matters. And in one area, it talks about all of the items that were not funded out of the one big, beautiful bill that the department then came to the appropriators to get funded out of base funding. There are also always things that come up throughout the process, new emergent requirements that have to be funded. And I thought that was a really important section of the joint explanatory statement for people to read if they don’t understand, like, well, why didn’t they put more funding here, or why didn’t they put funding there, to understand the pressures that are there. I also think, you know, I hear, and I had a lot of questions, when the administration and the department came out with acquisition reform, which I was thrilled to see. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy when people have been doing something the same way for so many years. It’s uncomfortable, and you need leadership to say, no, it’s okay, we’re doing things differently. And everyone assumed that the appropriators would hate flexibility. Appropriators don’t hate flexibility. It means you have to have accountability. We want to know what you’re doing with it. You’re not getting walking-around money. And appropriators every morning wake up knowing one thing: this is taxpayer dollars. This is not our money. How do you justify spending this money? We want to be able to justify it in the same way that, you know, we push so hard for budgets, for audits. The department should be auditable. These are tax dollars, period.
David 15:25
Well, you’re, I think you’re asking for a few miracles there on the auditing, but maybe.
Johnnie 15:30
Again, this is, maybe it can be done, but it’s not easy, Johnnie.
David 15:35
One thing I wanted to follow up on was the one big, beautiful bill that was passed in July. To me, that was a bit odd, right? The reconciliation bill and its big emphasis and the amount of money that it provided to the department, and of course it was during a continuing resolution. So how should people understand the one big, beautiful bill and its relation to the FY 26 appropriation, and how might it also show up in the bill so that people can kind of see how those priorities are aligned?
Johnnie 16:19
So with the one big, beautiful bill, it was a one-time infusion, and that’s what’s so important. Appropriators will talk about base funding, and that’s the number every year that you look at as base funding. When I was there, it was $833 billion. This year it’s $839, so it’s up $6 billion. Now, when you throw in the one big, beautiful bill, that doesn’t get added to the base. So people that get the money now, in five years there’s not going to be base money to continue something, so it’s not something you can count on for the long term. And I think that is really important for people to understand, that you’re going to need to have other funding mechanisms, or other people within the department or the services that want to pick up the funding, because that money is a one-time shot. And, you know, again, appropriators, we don’t love that. We like to take things into account, to review, to be able to say this is working, this is not working, more money here, less money there. And also, as an appropriator, we don’t love it when authorizers get to write appropriations bills, which effectively happened with reconciliation. But, I mean, it was a great infusion and a needed infusion. It’s just important that people understand exactly what it is and what it isn’t, that it is not adding to the base, it is not long-term additional funds. And even in this situation, there were things that the authorizers did not include in reconciliation that the administration wanted and, as a result, came to the appropriators to fund out of the FY 26 base funding. And what that means to founders is that you have several billion that would have been available to other programs that now had to go into programs that the administration wanted to be funded out of the reconciliation bill, if that makes sense.
Maggie 18:19
So turning gears a little bit to understanding how founders and startups should be interacting with the Hill, with appropriators, and really understanding this bill, the word lobbying comes to mind. I know lobbying can be seen as a dirty word by many, or at best it is a misunderstood word, but a lot of the startups that we work with, and a lot of large companies, leverage lobbying firms to great effect. So how does lobbying show up in the appropriations bill, if at all, and how should startups be communicating with appropriators?
Johnnie 18:57
So I am not a lobbyist. I am a strategic advisor, so I do not go anywhere on behalf of companies. My job is to advise companies exactly on this. How do you communicate? And I think the number one thing is do not assume. Do not assume members of Congress are who you see them as on television shows or movies. They are not all the same. There are show horses, but there are also statesmen. Know who you are working with, and a lot of times that is where hiring somebody from the outside who has actually been in and knows these people can tell you, yes, this person says yes to everybody and does not do anything, or does not have the ability to get things done, or this is something that this member or senator is passionate about. Congress does not fund things because it is a nice thing to do. Again, it is not their money, it is taxpayer dollars. What problems are you solving for? Be very concise. Once you identify what the problem is, and especially with appropriators, does it make something more lethal? Does it mean you are going to produce faster? What does it do to jobs? Does it mean it is going to save money? Highlight that. I cannot tell you, 90 percent of the one pagers I got were just full of buzzwords. After reading it, I understood less than I did before, and it just frustrated me. Make sure you are able to convey exactly what you are doing and be honest. Most of the staff have done this a long time, and Dave and I were talking about how one of the challenges is that committee staff stay there for many, many years. In the department, people are there for two to three years. So you will have somebody from the department come and talk about a program that the committee staff has been working on for ten, fifteen years longer than that person. They really know their stuff.
David 20:54
So Johnnie, if what you are saying is that a startup should go talk to the staff of the Appropriations Committee, go talk to the members who make up the Appropriations Committee specific to your subcommittee, in this case defense. But if you are going to communicate, tell them what your capability is, why it could be good for a certain constituency. But maybe what I am also pulling out is how is it better than what is currently available? So you as a founder need to understand the state of play today and what the military services are employing from other vendors, and why this is a step function better. Because coming in with just your shiny technology, I guess what you are saying is the first thing they are going to ask is, is that being satisfied by something that is already in the base budget? And why should I actually care about this innovative solution, exactly?
Johnnie 21:58
And also, be honest. I cannot stress that enough. These people are used to people trying to work them, and it takes a while to build up credibility. It takes seconds to lose it. I have had members that I worked for see a technology they were just blown away by. It was not always even in their district. They were thinking big picture, national security. And then every meeting, it did not matter who we were talking to, the head of INDOPACOM, PACOM, CNO, whomever, they brought this up. So if you can get them passionate about what it is you do, that is why it is important to know who you are going to talk to and why you are going to talk to them. I see this with some of my clients who have lobbyists. They will send me a list of who they are going to meet with, and I look at the list thinking this is a waste of time. It is not going to help them. Know why you are going in. Are you asking for something? Are you just creating the relationship? What is the purpose? Make sure you understand that. And above all, be yourself. It always made me laugh when people would say they were nervous to come in and see me, because I thought I was the easiest one to talk to. I think you can even tell on this podcast, I will say whatever I think. Just be yourself. If you do not understand it, do not pretend you understand it. What you understand is the tech, so stick with what you know and let the committee and the other people do what they do.
David 23:32
So Johnnie, I mean this is incredible, and thank you. Very helpful, very validating to some of the things I have always thought but never maybe knew concretely. But I want to take a step back. People will always say, hey, I need to get a funding line inserted into the appropriations bill, I have got to get my mark. Maggie is maybe not old enough, but I remember the days of pork, right? And I am sure pork went into the appropriations bill. But we do not do that today, or do we? It is just a little bit different. So how should founders think about the terminology of getting a line item into the appropriations bill?
Johnnie 24:20
So neither the House nor the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee includes earmarks. For this purpose, the definition of an earmark is directed funding for a specific entity. Actually, in the House rules, the definition that the House uses for earmarks is spelled out there. Everything we put in is supposed to be competitively bid if the department did not request it. So if it comes from the department, it is not an earmark. But if Congress adds something, it will be funding a line for a capability. Now, in many cases, you want to make sure you do not come to Congress and say, we have this great capability, make the department take it. You want to be doing your due diligence with the potential customer. You want them to say, we absolutely need this.
David 25:13
Well, what I am hearing you say is that you can talk to Congress and tell us how great your thing is. But if you do not have a customer representative inside the department who is going to advocate for the need for this type of capability that we are ultimately going to compete, whether by the Federal Acquisition Regulation statutes or other transaction agreements or some other contracting mechanism, it is almost like a wasted effort. If you do not have a demand signal coming from the department for this thing, talking to Congress is not really going to help you get a contract faster.
Johnnie 25:55
No, I absolutely agree with what you are saying. As a staff director, I was not going to say, oh, here is this great technology, Navy, you have to buy it. That is just not going to happen. Now, there are times when you talk to the right staff and they see a capability and think, oh my gosh, this would be fantastic for whatever service I am working with, or whomever, and they want to introduce you so that you can let them know what you have. That is something that can happen. But you really need a potential customer who, if they had the money, would want to spend it on that type of capability.
Maggie 26:37
So I noticed that in the bill that was released a few days ago, the word innovation is stated 34 times in the conference report. Following that word were capabilities, everything from solid rocket motors, which had $500 million attached, to DIU receiving $40 million for Pillar Two AUKUS-related fielding initiatives. What clues should startups be looking for in this bill to really understand the signal inside this appropriations bill with respect to emerging and commercial technology?
Johnnie 27:13
I will go back to what I said earlier, which is that appropriators do not like words. If they include a word, it is because it means something. To get into the joint explanatory statement, all four corners have to agree, meaning the House chair, the House ranking member, the Senate chair, and the Senate ranking member. That is a bipartisan, bicameral message on importance. So the fact that this makes it in is a signal to founders about where the priorities are. I was especially happy to see funding for solid rocket motors and those types of things, areas where many of us know there have been issues. That funding is being prioritized to fix those problems, and not just at the prime level. They specifically call out new entrants.
Maggie 28:02
And once a founder sees a budget line for something relevant to them, let us say I build a small UUV, an unmanned underwater vehicle, and I see there is $50 million for small UUVs, what is the next step a founder should be taking to actually tap into that budget line?
Johnnie 28:19
I think that is the point where a founder needs to talk to somebody who understands the process and has worked the process. In some cases, that money might already be spoken for. A line might have been moved. This is where the process does become more opaque. You need to make sure that the money is truly available, who is going to be managing it, and how they are going to get it. There is language in multiple places that says things need to be competitively awarded, except for certain exceptions. You want to make sure this is not one of the places where an exception is going to be provided, and that it really is available. This is very bespoke, and for each case you need someone who knows who to talk to or has the relationships to ask those questions.
David 29:13
So, Johnnie famously, I think the President put out a Truth Social post or a tweet or on X or one of those social media platforms stating that he would like to nearly double the defense budget to one and a half trillion dollars. You know, this is a little over half of the FY26 appropriation. So should we expect that the President’s budget request, when it gets submitted to Congress, will have a top line of one and a half trillion? And if you wouldn’t mind indulging us, what do you think sort of happens from there?
Johnnie 29:50
So I have been trying to track that down too. I don’t know the answer. I have many guesses. I think that it would be difficult to get a base budget at that level. I think there’s a possibility that that would include, but I do not know, another attempt at reconciliation, which I think would be very difficult in an election year, especially for the House. But one of the reasons that it makes me think of having that as the overall base budget is that several years ago, maybe six or eight years ago, we’d gone back to talking about how there are 12 appropriations bills. Historically, the Labor, Health and Human Services bill is, in general, a Democratic priority, and the defense bill has been the Republican priority. And so, as we’ve gone through and gotten close to shutdowns, they’ve started to travel together now. That’s why, for at least six years, you’ve seen them in packages together, and people will talk about parity. So if defense gets a certain amount of increase, then the Labor, Health and Human Services bill needs that increase. There is no scenario where Congress passes a bill with Labor HHS getting that much of an increase. So I often think in terms of three-dimensional chess, and I’m not sure how that would play out. And honestly, I’m not sure how, or if, it’s been decided exactly how that’s going to show up, because we’ve seen this administration get very creative.
David 31:35
Totally. Well, I mean, gosh, thank you so much for sharing your insights and obviously your well-deserved wisdom on the process. I know I definitely learned a lot, and we hope that our founders did as well. Thank you, Johnnie, for coming on. And for those of you that still want to stick with us, Maggie and I are going to highlight some of the winners and losers as we saw from the appropriations bill, based on whether or not Johnnie’s former colleagues decided to mark up or mark down a respective program. So stick with us. But Johnnie, thank you so much for coming on the Techquisition edition.
Johnnie 32:11
Thank you so much. Any time you have questions, let me know.
Maggie 32:14
Thank you so much, Johnnie. All right. Wow. Well, that was a great conversation with Johnnie, clearly a world-class subject matter expert on the world of appropriations. I don’t think I ever fully understood just how all of these different pieces work together, and I definitely learned a lot from that conversation. But I wanted to dive in a little bit here and get into some of the more specific details that came out in this bill that are going to be relevant for startups. Let’s talk through who some of the winners are and who some of the losers are in this appropriations bill that are going to matter for this ecosystem. So, David, maybe starting with some of the obvious ones, how did groups like the Defense Innovation Unit fare, or some of these other innovation organizations, in this bill?
David 33:06
Well, Maggie, yeah, I can never help myself but to do some control F when these types of documents come out and see how the Defense Innovation Unit does, and it looks like they did all right once again, right? They got a significant amount of money in the big, beautiful bill for fielding technology. They got an even larger plus-up from Congress relative to what the President’s budget request was, which was surprising to me. Once again, I think Congress is stating, especially on the appropriations side, that they like the way the Defense Innovation Unit does business. And I think for founders out there, DIU has been kind of a halcyon of an organization that awards contracts to venture-backed startups. So I would be on the lookout for more solicitations, or specifically, if you want a prototype project and you’re moving into production, it seems like there are a lot of line items that are explicitly focused on fielding these capabilities. They got some pretty large buckets of funding around some specific areas.
But I would now be a little bit remiss not to highlight that two sister organizations that are nested under the Defense Innovation Unit did not fare so well. I’m talking about the National Security Innovation Capital and the National Security Innovation Network, NSIC and NSIN, respectively. It looks like they both did get some money in the big, beautiful bill, but both were zeroed out in the President’s budget, and neither were plussed up by Congress. So in my mind, those organizations, as we know them today, are going away. Though I would be remiss not to state that NSIN appears to be morphing into a new entity known as these on-ramp hubs. I know that recently they just did a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Montana for what’s supposed to be an innovation hub out there, and there was a decent amount of money in the appropriations bill for that activity. But enough about the Defense Innovation Unit. Maggie, you write a blog that’s pretty dialed in on all things artificial intelligence as it relates to the department. What did you notice out of the appropriations bill?
Maggie 35:38
So one piece that caught my eye was the Chief Digital and AI Office. Specifically, their Alpha One programs seem to have been a big winner from this bill. This is essentially an AI infrastructure program that they manage to help spread artificial intelligence throughout the department. Last year, Alpha One had a $53 million budget. This year, that was bumped up to $401 million, plus an additional $140 million from reconciliation. So that’s almost, or maybe more than, a 10x increase there. We’ll definitely be seeing a lot more coming out of CDAO.
I’ll also just mention a few callouts. I saw that generative AI was mentioned three times in the joint explanatory statement. I don’t know if it’s ever been mentioned in past explanatory statements. I looked back a year or two and hadn’t seen it before. They’re looking at using generative AI for counter-UAS, looking at using it for mixed reality and immersive simulations, and then one other for real-time operational awareness. A couple of other smaller line items mentioned AI as well, including AI for night vision, multi-domain kill chain automation, cognitive decision aids, and autonomous battle management. Then there was a little bit of talk about using AI for warfighter health, specifically using it to optimize performance under acute stress. So definitely, we’ll be seeing more about artificial intelligence. This all seems to be feeding into the department’s AI strategy, which came out a month or so ago, so it’ll be interesting to see where we go from there.
David 37:27
I was going to say, it’s so good, because I think we talked a little bit in an earlier podcast about GenAI and its ability to help with a lot of different administrative tasks. But now, trying to apply this technology more broadly, I would imagine they’re taking a lot of lessons learned from both Ukraine and Israel on how this stuff could be implemented into the field. So it’ll be exciting to see how different companies implement these technologies, and then how we see it happening in exercises.
Maggie 38:02
Yeah, anything relevant in the world of space, or any of the services that we should be paying attention to?
David 38:08
Well, I’ll touch on space. You know, they were kind of flatlined, all things considered. And I know there are a lot of large initiatives. I guess I will say, Golden Dome aside, the Golden Dome seems like they need to hit the “I believe” button a little bit harder with Congress, because there were a lot of requests for information and understanding around how this is architecturally going to work. So, yeah, I mean, I was a little bit disappointed that space was not as big of a winner. It seems like other areas, like collaborative combat aircraft on the Air Force side, are doing pretty well. I saw on the Navy side a pretty big increase for their warfighting experiments and demonstrations, going from 82 million to 152 million. So you might think a lot about autonomous surface vehicles and underwater vehicles, right, and how they’re performing, and making sure that we’re building that into our concept of operations. Those were a couple other areas that stood out to me.
But I would recommend that founders, within different tech areas or services, look at some of the good materials out there written by outlets that are more professional than us, specifying exactly how things are playing out. Of course, this wouldn’t be a Techquisition Edition without me quickly highlighting the cyber stuff. As of right now, there was nothing in this appropriations bill for it, and in fact there was a section highlighting that if the cyber program isn’t authorized, then there’s money you don’t need to administer it. So the saga continues, yeah.
Maggie 40:00
Will remain to be seen what comes next. And David, just to close out the way that we’ve been closing out these other ones, what do you think our next Techquisition Edition podcast is going to be on, if you had to guess?
David 40:13
Well, I hope that it’s one of two things. It’s either the Small Business Innovation Research reauthorization, and we can talk about that in gory detail, or the President’s budget request, which traditionally is due to Congress in the February timeframe.
