As part of the deal to raise the debt limit, Congress recently approved defense budget caps for fiscal 2024 and 2025 that are well below what is required to carry out the National Defense Strategy (NDS).

At $886 billion for national security programs, which includes the Pentagon and Department of Energy atomic energy activities, the budget for fiscal 2024 does not keep pace with inflation and, after covering a large pay raise, actually imposes a cut of 3 % to defense operations and capabilities. This cut would increase to 9% in 2025.

As NDS Commission leaders recently emphasized , appropriately funding the nation’s security is not just about the budget top line. It is about how well the money we spend helps us confront the national security challenges we face. It is also about what we expect our military and defense civilians to do.

With the idea of expectations in mind, there are two important things to understand. First, we are not spending as much on defense as it may appear. Second, distracting our military from its core function has consequences.

The reality of a core function is crucial. It means the things that the Defense Department is expected to do and that only it can do — such as building a Navy, Army, Air Force, Space Force, and cyber proficiency capable of competing with China; sustaining and modernizing air, marine, ground, space, and special operations forces with power projection competence; and maintaining America’s nuclear capabilities.

As we look deeper into what the defense top line is funding, we see billions in programs and activities that do not produce military capability . We see duplication of work that is appropriately the mission of other federal departments and agencies. And we see a minimum of nearly 71,000 full-time equivalents — which is how the federal government calculates work hours — dedicated to managing, assessing, and reporting on these non-core efforts.

These programs and activities have made it so the Pentagon is doing the work of the departments of State, Energy, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Every time a new mission is assigned to DOD, it must manage, plan, execute, assess, and report on the activity. This draws personnel, management focus, and resources beyond those appropriated for the function away from what should be the defense core mission: preparing for, fighting, and winning America’s wars.

For example, each year the Pentagon carries out nearly $2 billion in non-military medical research that duplicates the work of the National Institutes of Health in areas such as cancer, autism, lupus, and Parkinson’s research. The department builds and runs U.S.-based schools. It funds $900 million in environmental restoration activities. And it encroaches into State and Homeland Security missions with funding for border security, regional centers, and security governance.

In addition, there are elements of supporting the military that are just not best managed by the federal government. For example, the defense budget supplements grocery stores — commissaries — with over $1 billion per year. Despite compelling evidence and previous legislative direction that showed unleashing the commissaries from government control could provide better service and a wider selection without the annual taxpayer subsidy, to date, the department has been unwilling to even test the concept.

The diffusion of defense resources and attention to all these other activities comes with second-order corrosive effects. Assigning nondefense missions to the Pentagon has ramifications for civilian-military relations. As the military is asked to perform nonmilitary activities, the lines between military and civilian roles and responsibilities get blurred, which risks damaging the military’s historical, proper place in society.

Inflation of the budget with these non-defense activities also contributes to dangerous comparisons between U.S. defense spending to that of allies, partners, and adversaries. The U.S. defense budget cannot be compared to that of China, or any other adversary, for numerous reasons, but partly because the U.S. and other free democratic countries tend to overestimate when reporting what they are spending on their security. In contrast, countries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia purposely underreport and disguise what they are spending on security.

As the defense budget tightens, we should remove non-core mission programs and activities that diffuse resources and attention from core defense programs and align those programs to the departments and agencies charged with corresponding missions.

We should then also move entitlement-like spending that is embedded in the defense budget for things such as healthcare, compensation, and benefits to a separate mandatory budget for management and execution.

Now is the time to free the defense workforce from carrying out the responsibilities of other federal agencies and departments and focus all attention on the true defense mission — to “provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security” and perform those duties only it can do.

Elaine McCusker is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She previously served as acting undersecretary of defense (comptroller) at the U.S. Department of Defense.