Six weeks ago I posted on this blog an article providing data on cuts to Advisory and Assistance (AA) services in the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Procurement budget request for fiscal year 2026. I mentioned in the previous article that I could not identify any cuts in the Army’s Other Procurement request. I don’t know if this is because the Army plans not to make cuts or if they just didn’t list them in the documentation. I also promised at the time that when I finished looking for AA cuts in the Army’s Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) request I’d post that data here. That process is now complete, so this week’s article details those cuts.

As a reminder, RDT&E funding is often referred to as “new” money because unlike Operations and Maintenance funding RDT&E typically goes to new program starts. Frequently, it is also the largest bucket of “new” funding dedicated to information technology projects. All of this assumes that Congress will eventually pass a budget for this fiscal year. If all we get are Continuing Resolutions, then there will not be any new starts. Let’s hope that does not happen.

The data shows that the Army plans to cut $165.3M for AA services out of its FY 2026 RDT&E budget request. The cuts stretch across 117 programs with the average reduction amounting to less than $1.0M for 73 of those programs. As for the total requested RDT&E budgets for these 117 programs, they amount to just over $8.9B, translating into a funding reduction of 1.8%.

The program that will see the biggest cut (-$26.4M) is called Concepts Experimentation. It has four sub-parts with the following FY 2026 RDT&E budgets: 1) Army/Joint Experimentation - $11M, 2) Current Force Capability Gaps - $32.5M; 3) Soldier-Centered Analyses for Future Force - $0; 4) Project Convergence - $15M. Cutting RDT&E funding for Project Convergence (it received $21.5M in FY 2025) is curious because it has attracted a lot of attention in recent years for testing new solutions during field exercises.

Here are all the RDT&E programs that will see AA service cuts in FY 2026:

Summing up, these aren’t catastrophic numbers in the grand scheme of things, but they affect those providing AA services for the listed programs, especially small businesses.