This is Sirens, a new series brought to you by the Ladies of Bombs Show, where we dissect the institutions of American power.

Join us as we sound the alarm on technology, governments, and national security issues, and maybe lure some men to their deaths.

I'm Erin Simpson.

I'm Radha Ayingar Plem.

And this is a mini episode with just Rada and I, where we are going to talk a little bit about the defense

budget, such as it is. So we're just going to dive right in, actually. Rada, you've participated

in several different budget builds over the last several years and probably in some previous

lives as well. Can you just sort of level set at a fairly nerdy level what the normal process is for budget

development in the Defense Department?

I'll try to keep this at like 65 to 70 percent nerd.

I feel like that's our target here.

So just by way of backstory, the Department of Defense has about a trillion dollar budget. That has to be

aligned each year and submitted to Congress in a number of programs. And the department runs a

department-wide process, largely run by CAPE, which is the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation

Office, to look at how the money is allocated

into those different programs and covering various bills once they look at the overall programmatic

view that goes over several years, five years to be precise, in an element called the FIDEP,

the future years defense programs. Then the comptroller

team, so sort of like the accountant of the Pentagon, then make sure that all the must pay's bills

are paid and begins transferring that into databases to be budgeted and then if approved by Congress executed it.

So big picture, that whole process needs to happen every year, which means it roughly starts

immediately after the previous budget was submitted. We used to joke, it's like the sun never

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