A panel of Army leaders will speak March 18 as part of the Association of the U.S. Army’s Coffee Series.

The in-person event will take place at AUSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. It will feature Kirsten Taylor, deputy assistant Army secretary for plans, programs and resources in the office of the assistant Army secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology; Maj. Gen. Mark Bennett, director of the Army budget; and Maj. Gen. Joseph Hilbert, director of force development in the office of the deputy Army chief of staff for resources and plans, G-8.

The event opens at 6:30 a.m. with registration, coffee and networking. The program is scheduled to begin at 7:15 a.m. It is free for military members, government employees and the media.

For more information or to register, click here.

Online registration is open through 5 p.m. Eastern March 14. On-site registration opens at 6:30 a.m. March 18.

During the Coffee Series event, Taylor, Bennett and Hilbert are slated to talk about the Army’s fiscal 2025 budget request. Their remarks will come just days after President Joe Biden is scheduled to release his fiscal 2025 budget proposal to Congress.

For the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, the Army’s budget request was for $185.5 billion, with money allocated to high-priority initiatives aimed at helping soldiers and their families and funding for the service’s transformation priorities.

However, as of March 6, the Army has been operating under a continuing resolution, stopgap funding that keeps spending at the previous year’s levels and prevents new program starts.

Army leaders have warned of the impacts of operating without full-year appropriations. “I think there’s a misperception that given the size of the department’s budget, if we’re operating under a yearlong [continuing resolution], we’ll be able to weather the impacts,” Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo said Feb. 28, according to CQ News. “And I’m here to say that there are significant impacts that most officials care about.”

If the Army is forced to operate under a full-year continuing resolution, leaders would be forced to make “some very tough tradeoffs,” Camarillo said, according to CQ News.

Camarillo also said that it will be difficult to present a new budget request to Congress for fiscal 2025. “It’s very difficult to establish a baseline against which we can assess where the investments ought to go in ‘25 until we know how the ‘24 appropriation lands,” he said, according to CQ News.