Recent years have witnessed a growing interest, in Congress, in the executive branch, and in the broader policy community, in re-examining how well the U.S. government conducts the business of national security—from decision-making, to strategy-making, to budgeting, to planning and execution, to accountability and oversight. Within the context of these debates, a number of practitioners and observers have called for the adoption of "unified"—or "consolidated" or "integrated"—approaches to national security budgeting. The primary concern of this unified national security budgeting school, loosely defined, is not to improve U.S. budgeting practices per se , but rather to use budgetary mechanisms to drive changes in the priorities and practice of national security. Members of the school broadly share the view that some U.S. national security concerns, such as counter-terrorism, or stabilization and reconstruction, are inherently cross-cutting: that is, they require the participation of multiple agencies, and their associated responsibilities could conceivably be divided up any number of ways among various agencies. Such changes, they add, could improve effectiveness and save money. Various proponents have put forward quite different proposed remedies and are—apparently—aiming to solve quite different underlying problems. For Congress, constitutionally mandated to control the power of the purse, fundamental issues at stake include both oversight of the effectiveness and efficiency of U.S. government national security activities, and the integrity of the overall federal system of budgeting. Of particular interest may be the extent to which, if any, efforts to optimize the overall system, and efforts to optimize its national security "sub-system," constitute competing imperatives. How the Current System Addresses National Security

The current system does not budget for national security in an explicit and bounded way. Third, skeptics might observe that "national security" is but one subset of overall U.S. concerns, and that optimizing for national security might well mean sub-optimizing in other arenas and at the level of U.S. government responsibilities. A Single National Security Budget

Perhaps the most ambitious approach to unified budgeting for national security would feature a single, shared pool of funding for all national security activities, with systemic-level decision-making and accountability from the White House, and with holistic congressional oversight of the entire pool. In turn, different levels of adjudication might introduce different kinds of potential costs. Of those, "crosscut displays" may be the most common. Strategically driven budgeting carries a number of potential costs in the sense of additional requirements. For any given unified budgeting proposal, what problem is it designed to solve—for example, are current U.S. national security efforts perceived to be too expensive, too ineffective, or imbalanced in the distribution of labor across the executive branch? For any unified budgeting proposal, how would the impact of its use on both effectiveness and efficiency be determined?
In recent years a number of observers and practitioners have identified various facets of U.S. government national security practice—decision-making, strategy-making, budgeting, planning and execution, and congressional oversight—as inherently "cross-cutting." They have in mind arenas—such as counterterrorism, and stabilization and reconstruction—that by definition involve multiple agencies, or for which responsibilities could be divided up in any number of ways among various agencies. For such facets of national security, they argue, the U.S. government is seldom able to conduct genuinely holistic consideration. The cost, they add, is a loss of effectiveness, or efficiency, or both.
In order to encourage holistic consideration of national security issues, some members of this inchoate school have called for the use of "unified national security budgeting" (UNSB). To be clear, their goal is not to refine the U.S. federal system of budgeting, but rather to use budgetary mechanisms to drive changes in U.S. national security practices. Within this broad school of thought, various proponents call for the adoption of a number of different approaches, from a single shared funding pool for all national security activities, to mission-specific funding pools, to crosscut displays, to more strategically driven budgeting. In turn, various proponents apparently aim to achieve quite different kinds of change with their proposed remedies—from rebalancing the distribution of roles and responsibilities among executive branch agencies, to saving money, to revisiting fundamental understandings about how U.S. national security is best protected.
For Congress, constitutionally mandated to control the power of the purse, the most fundamental issue at stake may be ensuring the integrity of the overall federal budgeting system—there may be no single best answer regarding how it should function, but that it function would seem to be of paramount importance. At the same time, while the current system does not adjudicate "national security" in an explicit, bounded way, and while no single, generally agreed definition of the boundaries of "national security" exists, Congress has oversight responsibility for any number of activities and executive branch agencies that could reasonably be considered to contribute to national security, and thus vested interests in both the effectiveness and the efficiency of U.S. national security practices. A basic challenge for Congress may be fundamental tensions between optimizing the overall federal budgeting system, and optimizing for its national security sub-system.
For any set of "unified budgeting" proposals, it may be helpful to Congress to consider what problems the proposals are designed to address; the potential costs and benefits that implementing the proposals might introduce; the risks the proposals might pose to the functioning of the current overall U.S. federal budgeting system; and how the impact of the implementation of the proposals would best be gauged.