Backstage at a Seattle tech event in the early 2000s, Chris Diorio was waiting his turn to speak. Next to him was Jeff Bezos, whose company was already becoming a household name.

Diorio, the leader of Impinj, then a tiny local startup, turned to the Amazon founder: “Jeff, you’ve got a much bigger near-term opportunity than we do,” Diorio recalls saying, “but we’ve got a much bigger long-term opportunity than you do.”

Before Bezos could respond, he was called onstage.

“The technology turned out to be way harder than I thought,” Diorio acknowledged after telling that story in a recent interview. “But that’s what I told him — and I still believe in those words. Our opportunity is to deliver physical intelligence for every item in the world.”

A quarter-century after that chance encounter, Diorio rang the Nasdaq opening bell Tuesday morning in New York City to mark the 10th anniversary of Impinj’s IPO. The company’s tiny, battery-free RFID chips — each smaller than a grain of sand — have been embedded in more than 160 billion items, including clothing, pharmaceuticals, airline luggage, and groceries.

Impinj commands nearly two-thirds of its market, won a patent war against a rival 15 times its size, and has grown from a $250 million IPO valuation to a market cap of more than $4.2 billion. Along the way, the company survived a billion-dollar industry hype cycle that killed nearly every competitor.

And yet, Impinj has posted exactly one profitable year since going public — thanks to a $45 million legal settlement at the time. Its accumulated deficit stands at $400 million, its financial reports show. Less than 1% of the items it envisions connecting are connected today. 

To Diorio, that speaks to the potential. The company is barely scratching the surface. He cited the 1% stat in his comments before ringing the Nasdaq bell on Tuesday morning, saying the “opportunity is so gigantic that we’ll still have a huge runway ahead of us 10 years from now.”

That the company has gotten to this point is as much a Seattle story as it is a technology story. Impinj has benefitted from a network of patient local investors, academic connections and supporters who gave the company the time that Silicon Valley never would have. 

But no one imagined it would take this long when they got started.

From Caltech to Seattle 

The origins of Impinj were at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1990s. Diorio was a graduate student working under Carver Mead, the physicist and engineer who helped coin the term Moore’s Law and helped lay the intellectual foundation for the modern semiconductor industry. 

Together, they discovered a way to change a transistor’s electrical properties after it had been manufactured — a quantum-mechanical phenomenon called “impact-ionized hot electron injection.” That made it possible to build chips so efficient and inexpensive that they could be embedded in disposable packaging. (“Impinj” is derived from that scientific name.)

In an oral history later recorded by the Science History Institute, Mead described Diorio as “a super-bright, super-high-energy guy” who “burned up the track” at Caltech.

After finishing his PhD, Diorio was recommended by Mead to the University of Washington’s computer science department. There was resistance among the UW faculty — his research in analog circuits wasn’t an obvious fit — but professor Larry Ruzzo carried the day. 

Ruzzo essentially said, “This guy is brilliant, and even if he is nothing other than our gift to the rest of the university, we should hire him,” recalled Ed Lazowska, the department chair at the time. 

Diorio joined the UW faculty in 1997. Over the next few years, his research earned a string of honors, including Packard and Sloan fellowships. A couple years later, Diorio met up with Mead on a trip to California, over dinner at Fresh Cream, a long-since-closed French restaurant in Monterey. Diorio asked Mead if it was time to start a company. 

“Are you up for it?” Mead asked. Diorio said yes. They started the paperwork the next day.

Impinj was incorporated in April 2000, headquartered in Seattle. It quickly got the attention of two local investment firms, with behind-the-scenes help from the everpresent Lazowska. 

On April 21, 2000, the UW computer science chair emailed Bob Nelsen at Arch Venture Partners and Tom Alberg at Madrona. He explained that he was urging Diorio and Mead “to get some local $ for the connections,” and that he had pointed them to Arch and Madrona. 

Patrick Ennis, then at Arch, reached out to Diorio that same day. As Ennis recalled in a recent interview, there were plenty of Silicon Valley firms that wanted in, thanks to Mead’s reputation, but Diorio and Mead decided to take Lazowska’s advice and go with Seattle investors. 

Diorio, who likes to take walking meetings, negotiated the terms with Ennis as they made their way on foot through the University of Washington Arboretum one day. The investment closed that summer: $15 million, split evenly between Arch and Madrona. 

Impinj at the time had patents, prototypes, and no real business plan. 

“That’s how venture capital should be done,” said Ennis, who has since become a Madrona venture partner. “You make big bets on great technology and great people.”

Betting the company on RFID

Bill Colleran joined Impinj as CEO in January 2001. He and Diorio had designed satellite chips together at defense contractor TRW in the 1980s. Colleran had just sold his Bluetooth startup, gotten married, and gone on his honeymoon. He came home to a message from Diorio: he’d started a company in Seattle and wanted Colleran to join. 

Colleran was soon in Seattle — one of six or eight people working out of what he warmly recalls as “a crappy little building” in the University District, several of them former TRW colleagues. 

“We were kind of getting the band back together,” he said. 

RFID wasn’t the original plan. Impinj’s first target was improving power efficiency for 3G wireless base stations, but the dot-com bust killed that market, and regardless, the company was too small to compete with the major chipmakers in the wireless industry.

The team spent two years exploring what to do with their technology. Cable modems required too much dependence on Intel, as Colleran recalled. Cell phone radios were dominated by players too big to compete against. GPS turned out to be a poor technical fit — Impinj’s chips excelled at low power, but GPS demanded low electrical noise, a different problem entirely. 

So they eventually settled on RFID, the technology that uses tiny wireless chips to identify and track physical objects. The industry was young, the standards were still being written, and Impinj’s low-power technology seemed tailor-made for it.

As Madrona’s Ennis and Tim Porter write in a piece pegged to the IPO anniversary, “When you have a truly powerful, groundbreaking deep technology, it behooves you to wander the product-market fit wilderness for a while, even when that is unsettling and downright frightening, and even when it runs contrary to what you learn in a VC class in business school.”

Then, a stroke of luck: In June 2003, Walmart announced it would require its top suppliers to tag every pallet and case with RFID chips. The Impinj team celebrated their good fortune. 

“We all high-fived,” Diorio recalled. “We did it. Eighteen months, we’re gonna IPO.”

In reality, it would be another 13 years.

Surviving the RFID hype cycle

Walmart’s announcement triggered a gold rush of venture capital investment into RFID technology startups. But there was no global spectrum allocated, no standard that worked, and no products ready to deliver on the promise. Walmart’s own January 2005 deadline came and went. Only half of its top suppliers could comply.

By 2008, the hype cycle had collapsed. Nearly every RFID startup died or got acquired. 

“More than $1 billion of VC money got poured into RFID,” Diorio recalled. “Way up, crashing down, and only one company that made it out the other side. … We were lucky enough that it was us.”

The real inflection didn’t come until around 2010, when retailers began tagging individual items, not just pallets. Knowing exactly which products were where, in real time, could lift same-store sales by as much as 10%, by solving a basic problem: getting items out of back rooms and onto shelves, making them available for purchase before customers gave up looking for them. 

Impinj filed to go public in April 2011, seeking to raise $100 million. But choppy markets — capped by the botched Facebook IPO in May 2012 — closed the window, and the company withdrew the filing that summer, raising $21 million privately instead.

After 14 years as CEO, Colleran stepped aside in 2014. 

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be a lifelong RFID guy,” he said. 

An exit wasn’t in sight — the IPO window was shut, and a sale didn’t make sense because Impinj made both chips and readers, and “any of the companies that would be interested in boxes weren’t chip companies, and the chip companies weren’t interested in boxes.”

Diorio took over as CEO that November. The venture investors were 14 years in and needed a path to liquidity. He spent the next two years sorting things out and getting the company ready.

The long road to IPO

Porter, now a Madrona managing director, who had worked closely with Alberg on the Impinj investment since 2007, recalled the final stretch. One of the first target dates for trading landed on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union, sending markets into a tailspin. 

“It was a little bit like, are you kidding — what next?” Porter said. 

But on July 21, 2016 — some 16 years after its founding — Impinj went public on the Nasdaq at $14 a share, raising $67 million at a market cap of just over $250 million. 

Alberg, the late, legendary investor, who was one of the first people to back Bezos’ fledgling online bookstore, personally invested $500,000 in the offering — a rare move among venture investors, who typically use IPOs to finally cash out, not double down. 

Porter called Alberg’s move “a really big signal” to the market that demonstrated his long-term belief in Impinj. It was also a smart investment, as it turned out. As noted during the Nasdaq bell-ringing Tuesday morning, Impinj’s share price has grown by nearly 900% since the IPO.

But there was one last hitch. On the night before trading began, the offering was so oversubscribed that the final allocation became a drawn-out negotiation between the board and the bankers over how many shares to issue. It dragged on so long that Diorio and CFO Evan Fein, stuck in Chicago for the roadshow, missed their flight to New York.

Fein had been one of the first people hired at Impinj, joining Colleran in the University District office in 2001 and staying through the whole ride. He was not about to miss the bell-ringing.

The CFO wanted to make a run for it, but Diorio told him there was no way — the flight departed in 30 minutes from O’Hare. Fein tried anyway. He didn’t make it. They stayed in Chicago overnight and caught a flight the next morning.

The company’s CTO at the time rang the bell in Diorio’s place. 

Trial by fire

The celebration was short-lived. After the IPO, demand for RFID surged — but Impinj, thinly capitalized after years of private fundraising, didn’t have the operational capacity to fill the orders. The stock quadrupled from its $14 IPO price to more than $60. Then it all came apart.

NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch chipmaker roughly 15 times Impinj’s size, moved aggressively on pricing and took business away. Customers who had been stockpiling RFID tags pulled back on orders. Revenue declined. On Feb. 2, 2018, the stock plunged 47% in a single day.

What followed was the darkest stretch in the company’s history. The company laid off 9% of its workforce. Then a former employee complaint triggered an audit committee investigation, forcing the company to miss an SEC filing deadline and drawing a deficiency notice from Nasdaq.

For months, the outcome was uncertain. Executives couldn’t trade their stock or issue grants to employees. The investigation cost $1.4 million. NXP, sensing an opportunity, continued to press its advantage.

Diorio described the investigation as mentally draining. The company was spending millions of dollars, the outside attorneys weren’t sharing their findings along the way, following the standard practice, and there was no way to know for certain how it would end. 

“You firmly believe you haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, “but who knows if somebody actually did something wrong that you don’t know about.” 

The investigation ultimately cleared the company, finding “no credible evidence” of wrongdoing, and Impinj received what Diorio called a rare letter from the SEC formally closing the matter. The stock surged 35% on the news.

Diorio called 2018 a turning point. “It was the year where everything got really difficult, the team and the company rallied, and it was the strength and the persistence of the team and their dedication that pulled us out the other side,” he said. “I’ll never forget that.”

The following year, Impinj went on offense. In June 2019, the company sued NXP, alleging it had copied 26 of Impinj’s patents. NXP countersued. The litigation stretched across five years and four lawsuits. In 2023, a federal jury found NXP had willfully infringed Impinj’s patents and awarded $18.5 million in damages. NXP settled in 2024, paying $45 million upfront and agreeing to ongoing royalties of roughly $17 million a year.

Where Impinj stands today

Diorio helped coin an industry term for the technology Impinj had built: RAIN RFID, short for “RAdio-frequency IdentificatioN.” It distinguished what Impinj does (using battery-free chips to identify and track individual items at scale) from other flavors of RFID used for key cards, animal tags, and contactless payments.

Today the company employs more than 450 people, most of them based in its headquarters at 400 Fairview Ave. N. in Seattle, with a test and development lab on Beacon Hill. The workforce is a fraction of NXP’s, which has more than 32,000 employees — a reminder that Impinj has built a market-leading position with a comparatively small team. 

Impinj holds an estimated 64% of the global market for RAIN RFID endpoint chips, up from 51% the year before, according to ABI Research. The company first overtook rival NXP for the market lead in 2024. The industry shipped nearly 53 billion chips in 2024, roughly one for every six or seven people on Earth. Impinj has connected more than 160 billion items cumulatively.

Each chip is battery-free, costs a few pennies, can be read wirelessly from 30 feet away, and identifies individual items at a rate of up to 1,000 per second. Vision systems can’t identify individual items. QR codes require line of sight. NFC has a range of four inches. Bluetooth requires a battery.

“Name any other technology that even gets close,” Diorio said. “You won’t come up with one.”

Privacy concerns nearly killed the RFID industry in its early years, when consumer groups campaigned against the technology in the mid-2000s. Although there’s privacy innovation still to come, Diorio said those fears have largely faded. The chips carry only a number, respond only when powered by an external reader, and don’t track people. 

One retailer already turns its tags invisible after the point of sale, though Diorio noted that’s “not the best solution because then that inhibits recycling.” 

His longer-term goal is cryptographic security, chips that can’t be cloned, putting “a dent in global counterfeiting” while keeping consumer data protected. 

Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is shifting. Diorio views NXP as the only real competitor — “everybody else in the market is a partner,” he said — but the competitor list in Impinj’s SEC filings has grown from two names at the time of the IPO to more than six, including four Chinese chipmakers. When a product costs pennies, low-cost competitors have a natural opening.

Retail apparel remains the core market. About 60% of all RAIN RFID tags go on clothing. But that reliance has made the business volatile. Three times in 10 years as a public company, demand from retailers has dropped sharply, dragging revenue and the stock with it. 

Earlier this year, Impinj’s stock plunged after the company issued guidance well below expectations. Part of the challenge: the company’s top three customers account for 61% of revenue.

The financial picture reflects a company that is still proving itself. Revenue has grown from $123 million in 2018 to $361 million last year, but Impinj has posted just one profitable year since going public — a $41 million gain in 2024, boosted by the NXP settlement.

To Diorio, all of this is prelude. Apparel, he said, is “tiny” compared to the total market of every item manufactured, transported, and sold. General merchandise, supply chain logistics, pharmaceuticals, food — each is an order of magnitude larger, or more.

“We have a gigantic blue ocean,” he said. “It’s the size of the Pacific.”

Machine learning and AI

The company is also using machine learning to move beyond handheld inventory scanning. Fixed readers mounted in ceiling tiles and other locations can track items autonomously at store choke points, from receiving docks to fitting rooms to exits, replacing employees who currently walk the aisles waving handheld scanners. 

More broadly, Diorio sees tagged items as a data source for AI, generating hard information at every point in a product’s journey from factory to shelf to recycling bin. 

“Most of the modeling that goes on today is based on guessing,” he said. “If the models are based on hard data, it’s immensely more valuable.” 

The biggest bet ahead is food. Three of the top five U.S. grocers (Kroger, Walmart, and Albertsons/Safeway) are piloting RFID for food freshness, according to Diorio, using tags to identify items approaching their expiration dates so they can be marked down before they end up in the trash. 

A European grocer is pushing toward fully automated checkout, where a basket of tagged items moves down a conveyor and is read instantly, no scanning required.

These are pilots, not deployments. The grocery market dwarfs apparel in volume, and Impinj has yet to prove it can crack it at scale. But here again, Diorio sees this as untapped potential. 

“My enthusiasm is as high as it’s ever been,” he said. “We are just getting going.”

And this time, he made it to New York to ring the opening bell. 

During his Nasdaq remarks on Tuesday morning, Diorio told the story of getting stuck in Chicago for the IPO a decade ago, using the anecdote to make a larger point.

“The team stepped in,” he said. “The team that was here covered everything, rang the bell, did all the process, and did it beautifully. In fact, probably better than we could have. And that is the story of Impinj. It’s the team.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated July 23, 2026, to reflect ABI Research’s 2025 market share estimate of 64% for Impinj, up from 51% in 2024 as originally reported. The spelling of former CFO Evan Fein’s name was also corrected.

Tom Hiddleston is fascinated by Pompeii. As he tells me below, "Pompeii isn't just a place; it's the people." Outside of acting, one of Hiddleston's true passions in life is the ancient world. Stealing a page out of his character Loki's playbook on the Marvel show on Disney+, Hiddleston attempts to travel back to 79 AD to investigate the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston.

Back in the late 90s when absolutely everybody knew that Java was going to become the one programming language to rule them all, the Java Ring was handed out to folks at Java developer conferences as an example of how it was going to revolutionize smart wearable devices. Recently [Daisuke Yamazaki] got his mittens on one of these collector’s items to see about reviving it.

We talked about these rings and associated iButton devices before, with their intended use being primarily to act as authentication keys. For the Java Ring, this use was mostly just used as a kind of gag, whereby visitors to these conferences could specify their coffee preferences at a terminal, having this programmed into the ring so that they could get their desired cup of literal java at various bean juice dispensers around the conference site.

Talking to one of these iButton devices requires a so-called Blue Dot adapter, which [Yamazaki-san] purchased along with the ring. Although the device happily responded on the 1-wire bus, figuring out how to interact with the original Java-based firmware and answering the question of how much of the original information of someone’s coffee preferences in ’98 were retained would require more sleuthing.

After recovering an installer for the Dallas Semiconductor’s IB-DE IDE from the Wayback Machine, this posed the next problem. As it was a 32-bit Java binary, which didn’t play nice with the modern Java 25 runtime and belying the ‘write once, run anywhere’ marketing phrase of back then. Downgrading to 32-bit Java 1.8 with since removed communication APIs helped here.

With the IDE in place, the traffic between the Java Ring and the PC-based software could be analyzed to figure out what was going on. This revealed CRC errors that pointed to the built-in lithium backup battery having expired. Unfortunately the stainless steel case is meant to be sealed and thus turn into e-waste the moment said battery calls it quits. Here fortunately a Japanese TV program picked up on these efforts and featured his efforts on national TV.

This led to the happy ending, with some help with others in replacing this battery. This also answered the question of which parts of the firmware and data were in the battery-backed RAM and which in ROM. Although full details of the findings here are a bit scarce, it seems that the original data was lost along with the dead back-up battery, but the ROM retained the JVM and allowed for a new program to be eventually written to the device and retained across reader sessions.

Although these days the various NFC standards have made bulky devices like iButtons rather obsolete, they’re still a fun look at an era when it was thought that lugging a tiny computer as a (key) ring around for authentication was the future. Of course these days we mostly lug an entire 6″ smartphone for that purpose, so maybe the joke is on us after all.

Thanks to [Wood] for the tip.

“This is not at all a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget. This is a budget-driven budget. If you look at the Truth Social posts by the President [Trump] and the statements of the people around him, he [President Trump] makes very clear that this budget was driven by a budget number, a budget target, an arbitrary level that was set based on five percent of last year's GDP…They set this arbitrary level and then at relatively the last minute in the budget development process the [Defense] Department was told come up with a request that gets you to this number, this $1.5 trillion number. And so they did.”

That was Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute and one of the nation's top experts on defense strategy and the defense budget, speaking last Tuesday at the Brookings Institution as part of a panel on The FY 2027 defense budget: How much is enough?

Remember, as I wrote last week, the Trump FY 2027 defense request is for $1.15 trillion with another $350 billion request to be placed in a FY 2026 reconciliation package; and there now also is the new FY 2026 supplemental request, which has another $67 billion for the Defense Department.

House members have been weighing all the defense numbers and this week may be voting on a FY 2026 reconciliation package of $95 billion with only $73 billion for defense – far less than what was being sought.

Last Tuesday, Harrison went on to explain what may have been going on: “I say it is absolutely not a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget because they didn't have to make hard choices. They made some easy choices.”

As an example, Harrison said, “Do you want, you know, a fourth generation fighter jet? Buy some new fourth generation [F-15s]; or do we want to continue buying the fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 we have in production; or do we want to invest in sixth generation fighters? Do all of them, right? You can do all three at once, if you have a virtually unlimited budget, you don't have to make those hard tradeoffs.”

And, in fact, all three are included in the proposed FY2027 defense budget.

But Harrison goes on to suggest another way to view this Trump defense budget giant increase saying, “There's still a limit to how much the department can consume in terms of this funding…because I don't think they [the Trump budgeteers] actually intend this to be like a one-year budget authority number, especially with the reconciliation [set at $350 billion]. I think it is actually more like a five-year budget number that they're trying to get pre-funded up front, but they actually plan to spend it at a slower pace over the next five years.”

Harrison also looked at “the parts that I think absolutely don't belong in here are these big pots of money they created in defense-wide accounts that have very little description with them.”

For example, he picked out “$54 billion in the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) line item. That is a single program element that's got $54 billion in it,” Harrison said. “That's unprecedented. If you read the budget description with it, it gives very little detail. You know, it's [clears throat] supposed to be investments in drones and things like that, but like tell us

quantities, tell us specific types of drones, like tell us what you're going to be using it for, and that detail is not there.”

Harrison went on, “It appears they haven't figured that out yet, so I think $54 billion is quite a reach, trying to ask for that much money for something that has not yet been well defined. So, I think that there are areas here where they've really overshot and they've tried to just throw everything in there and ask for a super high number. And I wonder if they almost expect that they're not going to get that full number -- that Congress will cut them back down quite a bit. But they were just trying to reach that overall $1.5 trillion level.”

As Yahoo Finance pointed out earlier this month, the $54 billion for DAWG sought for FY 2027 is 243 times greater than what DAWG got this year, and “now exceeds the entire Marine Corps budget request of $52.8 billion and represents nearly 15% of the entire $350 billion reconciliation package.”

Harrison’s view: “You get to the endgame, Congress is going to have to sort through this and say, ‘Okay, what are the what things in here are serious things that really do need to get funded one way or the other, and we'll have to figure out how to make that happen, and what are the other things that were just budget gimmicks or just filler?’"

Harrison was not the only expert on last Tuesday’s Brookings panel.

Joining him were David Wessel, who runs Brookings’ tax and fiscal policy in the economic studies program; and Mara Karlin, professor at John's Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who has worked for six Defense Secretaries over her career.

Wessel took a broader financial view saying, “The President is proposing a big defense budget at a time when we have unsustainable fiscal trajectory, and so I think that raises an important question and that question is…budgeting is about tradeoffs and the President and Congress at the moment seem to be avoiding trade-offs. There are ways we could offset if defense spending is really important. We should think about ways to pay for some of it either by cutting some other places in defense or raising taxes. And there's some ideas floating around on that, but none of them are politically popular.”

Wessel also raised two other issues: “I think it also requires some trust on the part of the public that the money is being well spent and that relies on Congress doing oversight. And secondly, that we are sticking with a military that is nonpartisan and follows the leadership of the President and the Congress, but is not totally politicized. And I'm afraid that the trust in the military is being eroded by some of the personnel decisions that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is making. And I think that's a problem.”

As for Karlin, she referred to the Trump national strategy and focused on what she called “a break with the bipartisanship that has characterized how folks have thought about these threats for a long time.”

Karlin noted, “The real emphasis of this [Trump national] strategy is on the Western Hemisphere, right? The real threat is seen in this strategy as these alleged narco-terrorists as they're so named…So, that's the priority.”

But, she adds, “You then see China mentioned, but in a pretty circumscribed way, just the first island chain. And in general, the language reads a lot softer than almost any recent defense strategy. You see a desire to downgrade involvement in European affairs, a little bit of mention of the Middle East, but in no way signaling that we would be starting this massive [Iran] conflict. And so here's where I think, there's some confusion worth highlighting because traditionally a national defense strategy is a decoder ring. It's going to tell you where the Secretary of Defense will put their energy and attention.”

“When we look at this budget, this very large budget, that's really at kind of World War levels,” Karlin said, “and frankly, the number [$1.5 trillion] isn't really merited by the strategy.”

She explained, “If one were really to just prioritize the Western Hemisphere and this quite circumcised focus on China as a major threat, and not be involved in most other regions of the world, in fact, the Trump administration could have put out a quite tiny defense budget request. So I leave you with a bit of perplexity.”

Two more things Harrison mentioned need recording.

“I forgot to address the [Trump] battleship issue,” Harrison said at one point, “because you know that's in here and far from defending it, I think that's one of those examples of things that got thrown in because they didn't have to make tough choices.”

Then he explained, “No one in the Navy can say with a straight face that we're going to go from starting a brand-new, clean-ship design in FY 2027, to procuring the lead-class [battle]ship in FY 2028, to going to all the way by FY 2031 being at full rate production, ready to buy them at one per year. That doesn't pass the laugh test…And so are we just setting ourselves up to spend a few billion dollars chasing, you know, this weird idea before we eventually have to cancel it and then things go back to the way they were before.”

Finally, Harrison said, “I think there needs to be some fundamental look on the congressional side at just how do we reform the budget process to get it working again; open the aperture to things like changing the start date of the fiscal year [which now begins October 1], re-jiggering the committee structure.”

I believe Harrison is questioning why each year the Armed Services Committees in both the House and Senate each authorize spending programs, and then the House and Senate Appropriations Committees set the actual dollar-level of funds made available for that year.

“You know,” Harrison said, “I'm talking a lot of third rails here, but I think we're at that kind of point like we were in the early 1970s where Congress realized it [the budgeting process] just wasn't working. I think that they need to do some serious inward-looking reform like that.”

I agree, having twice worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s, and followed defense spending over the past 60 years. Harrison is right – the Legislative Branch system for passing Executive Branch funding needs to be repaired.

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