Advisory and Assistance Services in the FY 2026 DOD Operations and Maintenance Budget Request

Back in the spring of this year, the President signed Executive Order (EO) 14222 “Implementing the President's Department of Government Efficiency Cost Efficiency Initiative.” In response to this EO, the Department of Defense/War (DOD/W) set out to identify types of Advisory and Assistance (AA) services that could be cut in the coming year’s budget request.

I’ve documented the identifiable cuts in a series of posts on the Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) portion of the budget for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Space Force, and in the Defense Procurement budget. The final budget category to examine is Operations and Maintenance (O&M).

The Military Departments (MILDEPS) present this data a bit differently in the FY 2026 O&M budget request than they do in the Procurement and RDT&E requests. Cuts are summarized as those taking place at Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) vs. Non-FFRDC work, which are services provided by contractors.

There are 42 FFRDCs and these are public–private organizations that do R&D work for federal agencies. Universities and corporations run FFRDCs to complete projects that cannot be done by existing in-house government expertise or by contractors. FFRDCs also cannot compete for work, so the data presented here will focus on “Non-FFRDC” work because that affects industry directly.

The Fourth Estate agencies did not provide data on O&M cuts, so the data here is from the MILDEPs only. Lastly, AA services are defined in four reporting categories: Management and Professional Support Services; Studies, Analyses, and Evaluations; Engineering and Technical Services; and Training and Leadership Services. Readers seeking detailed definitions of these categories should see Section 911 of this legislation on Congress.gov. If a category is missing from the table below it means the MILDEP did not report changes to it.

The data yields the following observations:

• At -44%, the Navy anticipates cutting the most from its AA services. The Army comes in a close second with -42% and the Marine Corps anticipates cutting the least (-3.0%).
• The Air Force (-50%) and Navy (-54%) expect to cut the most from Management and Professional Support Services.
• The Army (-56%) anticipates cutting the most from Engineering and Technical Services.
• Some categories will actually see growth, including Engineering and Technical Services at the Air Force (+49%); Studies, Analysis, and Evaluations at the Army (+68%); Management and Professional Support Services at the Marine Corps (+1.0%); and Engineering and Technical Services (+%) and Training and Leadership Services (+74%) at the Navy

Summing up, while the bottom line shows that the MILDEPS anticipate reducing their budgets for O&M-related AA services from $10.7B in FY 2024 to $6.8B in FY 2026, there are some areas that will see growth. Industry partners providing those types of services could therefore find business opportunities in their areas of expertise, but they may need to shift business development resources from one MILDEP to another depending on the type of service they provide.