The Navy and Marine Corps are both asking Congress for more than $250 million to address the declining state of their barracks buildings — something that has been highlighted both in media and government watchdog reports — amid a push to prioritize spending on sailors.
The Navy wants to invest $204 million in the restoration of unaccompanied housing — a 24% increase from last year’s request — and the Marine Corps said it’s asking for $65 million, according to materials provided by the Department of the Navy on Friday.
The move comes as military leaders struggle to fund all their priorities after last year’s move by Congress to cap the defense budget as part of a bipartisan agreement. The Navy’s budget director, Rear Adm. Ben Reynolds, stressed that the constraints forced them to “make hard choices.”
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“In those hard choices, we prioritize readiness to deploy and operate our fleet [and] we prioritize our people,” Reynolds said in a briefing to reporters Friday.
The Navy and Marine Corps budget request will now go to Congress, which will take the proposals and craft its own version of the military’s budget this year.
Reynolds said the service made a deliberate choice to spend money on “restoration [and] modernization first to get it to a place where we want our young sailors to live” before shifting to building more new…
