The Pentagon is testing a digital funding system to replace PDF-based budget transfers, aiming to cut disbursement times from months to as little as two weeks.
For years, the Defense Department has used PDFs to manage how it spreads billions of dollars across the armed forces each year. Now a team of defense and industry officials are testing whether ditching PDFs for modern financial software could get that money out to troops faster.
The working group was created earlier this spring to slash the time it takes to send funds appropriated by Congress down to the program offices and units that need them, Jay Hurst, the Trump administration’s nominee for Pentagon comptroller, told senators this week.
Hurst, who launched the team while performing the duties of comptroller earlier this year, wants the department to disburse money in a week or two, rather than the current lag time of two or three months. That could mean, for instance, that new equipment is delivered to the field sooner or facilities are repaired more promptly.
“We don’t have a centralized electronic funds disbursement system,” Hurst told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing Tuesday, responding to members’ concerns that DoD doesn’t spend congressionally appropriated funds as quickly as lawmakers might like.
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“When [the] comptroller initially gets an apportionment from [the Office of Management and Budget], we get that via PDF, and then we provide a PDF to the services,” he said. “That’s obviously not acceptable in the 21st century.”
The team is part of a larger steering group composed of senior financial management leaders, personnel from the comptroller’s office and other defense agencies, and industry consultants, a DoD official told Federal News Network in an email.
The group turned to an “existing data platform” to create a proof of concept that could be used to make the funding process more transparent, the official said. The official declined to disclose what software the team is using or its manufacturer.
The prototype is currently in testing and will be connected to a “visualization platform for executive leadership,” the official said.
A centralized system wouldn’t replace the patchwork of resource planning systems already used across the department, the official said. Instead, officials are considering how the new platform could work with existing software — like the Air Force’s Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System — to move data more efficiently and reduce manual processing.
“This effort reflects the Department of War’s commitment to modernizing our outdated financial management systems, improving enterprise-wide transparency, and providing more timely, reliable information to our leaders,” the official said.
It’s unclear how long the project could take or how much it might cost. The official said DoD is assessing the level of effort it may require.
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Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight, warned that such an effort could easily blow past its schedule and budget because of the complex nature of connecting disparate systems.
“I would expect this to be very challenging,” he said, noting that other federal agencies may have similar products the Pentagon could adopt.
But the benefits could prove significant. Using PDFs to share monetary data introduces “all kinds of opportunities for misinterpretation,” Williams said.
Rather than looking at the image of a PDF, “transmitting transaction data in structured, digital form preserves explicit definitions of the structure of individual data and the relationships among different data elements,” he noted.
A database that’s standardized and easily searchable leaves less room for the person approving funds to misunderstand what they’re reading or to miscalculate numbers, Williams said. And employees would save time by no longer opening PDFs one by one to find what they need.
“Just as it makes it easier for government employees to quickly search for and perform operations on the data, it potentially would make it easier for transparency advocates to do that as well,” he added.
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Rachel Cohen covers the Department of Defense for Federal News Network. An award-winning reporter and editor, she has written about the U.S. military and defense industry since 2016. To contact her about recent changes in the federal government, please email rachel.cohen@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at rcohen.64.
