Sen. Bernie Sanders, a longtime member and former chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee who has effusively honored the extraordinary bravery of our nation’s veterans, says our country does not need to let the Pentagon spend $778 billion.
Consequently, Sanders said he will vote against the National Defense Authorization Act.
“Many of my colleagues, day after day, talk about how deeply concerned they are about the deficit and the national debt. They tell us that we just don’t have enough money to expand Medicare, to guarantee paid family and medical leave, and to address the climate crisis,” said Sanders. “Yet, tomorrow, the U.S. Senate will be voting on an annual defense budget that costs $778 billion.”
Sanders noted that $778 billion is $37 billion more than President Donald Trump’s last defense budget and $25 billion more than that amount that President Joe Biden requested.
“Isn’t it strange how even as we end the longest war in our nation’s history, concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful Military Industrial Complex?,” asked Sanders. “Further, it is likely that the Senate leadership will attach to the National Defense Authorization Act the so-called ‘competitiveness bill,’ which includes $52 billion in corporate welfare, with no strings attached, for a handful of extremely profitable microchip companies.”
Sanders scolded Democrats in Congress who left priorities like paid leave, free community college, and Medicare expansion for hearing, dental, and vision care on the chopping block.
“Combining these pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the bill to over $1 trillion – with very little scrutiny,” said Sanders. “Meanwhile, we’ve spent month after month discussing if we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor and the future of our planet.”
Legislation to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive with China could instead end up swamping the military’s annual defense authorization bill in complex congressional negotiations, the Democratic chair of the House Armed Services Committee warned Tuesday.
The legislation provides billions more for equipment purchases than the White House requested and all but assures steady growth in America’s military spending, which is greater than the combined total of the next seven largest military budgets around the world.
The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the world military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015.
Over the 20 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. has spent more than $21 trillion on militarization, surveillance, and repression — all in the name of security — but the attempted coup d’etat on January 6 shows our people and Constitution are not really safer.
The budget policy measure, which passed the House of Representatives by a bipartisan 316 to 113 vote, includes a 2.7 percent pay raise for troops starting in January, sweeping changes to military sexual assault prosecutions, and language requiring women to register for the first time for a potential military draft.
Rep. Adam Smith said he was open to trying to merge the sweeping $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, or USICA, with the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act defense bill as planned by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, but it would not be easy.
“I believe in the ability of people to reason together, but it takes time,” said Smith, who overlapped with Republicans earlier this month to criticize Schumer over a two-month delay in advancing the NDAA. “We’re having those conversations and we’re engaging, but waiting until mid-November to launch this effort ramps up the degree of difficulty significantly.”
The House has wrestled for weeks with its own China competition legislation. On Tuesday, Smith said the Science Committee, Ways and Means Committee and Higher Education Committee have concerns with the Senate bill. As does the Foreign Affairs Committee, which passed its own similarly-focused bill in July with only Democratic support.
“It’s an important piece of legislation and if we can get it done, that’d be great,” Smith said. “But it’s also a very large and very complicated piece of legislation with a lot of committee chairmen who are interested one way or the other.”
The Congressional Budget Office in October released a report, “Illustrative Options for National Defense Under a Smaller Defense Budget,” that outlines three different options for cutting funding for the Department of Defense by $1 trillion, or 14 percent, over the next ten years.
Another CBO study estimated that plans for U.S. nuclear forces would cost more than $63 billion per year over the next decade, or $140 billion more than it’s previous estimate.
Over the past ten years, the U.S. has paid out $3.7 trillion, adjusted for inflation, to Pentagon contractors without headline-making congressional negotiations as part of the larger $7.2 trillion (2021 dollars) that was handed over to military suppliers almost unquestioned since 9/11.
For that money, the U.S. has gotten many copies of a supposedly cutting-edge military plane that has spontaneously caught fire at least three times, has heavily subsidized average CEO pay of $17.7 million at the top military contractors, and allowed corporations to rake in profits even while they failed wildly in the effort to reconstruct Afghanistan.