Defense Industry Daily reported:

The Center for American Progress and the Institute for Policy Studies, two left-wing American think tanks, are advocating the implementation of a unified security budget, and defense budget cuts at the scale, but not in the shape, of the sequester. PDF report.

The basic aim seems to be to consider “all the tools” of national security and make tradeoffs between them. The authors appears to assume that this would move funds from DOD to Dept of State, to bring “better balance.”

A possible advantage of such a scheme, from a Coast Guard prospective, might be an expectation that some funding might be shifted from the Navy to the Coast Guard, but there is no assurance, given the Navy’s powerful influence, that it would not actually go the opposite direction. An H-65 is pictured on the cover, but the Coast Guard is mentioned only twice in the 119 page document, and in neither case is it in the context of considering the impact of this proposal on the CG budget.

Certainly the budget process in Congress appears broken. Coast Guard leaders must testify before a confusing plethora of committees and sub-committees, apparently so frequently, it adversely impacts their ability to do their jobs.

There is some indication that viewing all aspects of security as a whole is gaining some traction:

The Budget Control Act divided its mandated spending cuts in FY 2012 into two categories: “security,” which included the Departments of Defense, International Affairs, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs accounts, and “non-security,” which included all other discretionary account categories. (p. 7)

But this distinction was subsequently replaced by wording that distinguished only DOD and other.

Does this proposal have a ghost of a chance? Will it help? I waited to see if President Obama would be reelected before posting this, because a Republican win would have made it even more unlikely. Efforts to trade off among DOD, DHS, and State could just be another layer of bureaucracy heaped on top of the existing dysfunctional morass, but perhaps as part of a comprehensive restructuring, it might be useful, but it seems unlikely we will see a significant change.

The name I recognized in the group that made this proposal, and one of the two principle authors, was Lawrence J. Korb, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress.

“Lawrence J. Korb is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the Center, he was director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Korb also served as director of the Center for Public Policy Education and senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. Korb served as Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations, and Logistics) from 1981 through 1985. In that position, he administered about 70 percent of the defense budget. Korb served on active duty for four years as a naval flight officer, and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of Captain. He has written 20 books and more than 100 articles on national security issues.

He’s not quite at the top level, but he is respected and not without influence.