More Is Never Enough: House Authorizes $839 Billion in Military Spending

PEACE ADVOCATE AUGUST 2022

By Maryellen Kurkulos and Brian Garvey

In the last week of July, the House of Representatives authorized another increase of the already bloated Pentagon budget to $839 Billion in a 329-101 vote. Not only does this represent a $67 Billion increase from last year, it’s $37 Billion more than President Biden, Commander-in-Chief of the military, requested. To put such large sums in perspective, compare just the increase in defense spending with federal spending to counter climate change. The increase in war spending alone, at $67 Billion, is more than our entire budget to fight climate change ($44.9 Billion).

Here in Massachusetts members of Congress did poorly on the military spending bill. Of the nine members of the House delegation from Massachusetts, only two voted against expanding the Pentagon budget. Those members were Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley from Boston and Chairman of Rules Jim McGovern, who represents Worcester and Central Massachusetts.

The representatives who voted to send more money to the military were Assistant Speaker Katherine Clark, Chairman of House Ways and Means Richard Neal, Congresswoman Lori Trahan, Congressman Seth Moulton, Congressman Stephen Lynch, Congressman Jake Auchincloss, and Congressman Bill Keating. Clark, Trahan, and Auchincloss voted for an amendment that would have cut $100 Billion from the Pentagon budget, but turned around and voted for the bill when the cut was not included. In theory these three members of Congress are for cutting the defense budget. In practice they voted to substantially increase military spending. Congressmen Neal, Lynch, Moulton, and Keating are not even for the cut in theory!

The breakdown on a national level of the most meaningful vote, final passage of the budget, shows a disturbing turn. 180 Democrats voting yes. Only 39 voted no.  This, from the party that outlined cuts in military spending in their own platform, represents a major reversal of a campaign promise. A large majority of House Republicans (149) voted for the $67 Billion increase. 62 voted no. There’s clearly something seriously wrong with both major political parties, but for the party that has traditionally suggested cuts in defense, to vote in larger numbers for such a substantial increase is very concerning.

Unfortunately, the ever-rising military budget is nothing new. Every Summer the US Congress deliberates the administration’s federal budget request for the coming fiscal year. It’s a much anticipated opportunity for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (M-I-C-C) to siphon more of our tax dollars into Pentagon coffers. Instead of being a check on Executive power and overreach, the Legislative branch now consistently adds money on top of the president’s request. This year Biden’s Pentagon budget proposal was already enormous, a $30 Billion increase. Congress went ahead and added another $37 Billion for good measure. Research by security analyst Stephen Semler shows that House members who voted for the NDAA took 4.2x as much in campaign contributions from “defense” contractors, than those who voted no. 

It seems that more is never enough. Military spending increased sharply under Trump. But with the US war in Afghanistan finally ended, the longest in American history, logic would dictate that a sizable portion of this year’s  Pentagon budget, over 3/4 Trillion dollars, could be responsibly repurposed to provide real security for the American people. Yet rather than roll back this profligacy, both Biden and Congress continue to markedly increase the Pentagon budget, now greater in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was at the heights of the Vietnam and Korean wars.

These recent actions clearly show how the Pentagon is exempted from the kind of budgetary scrutiny that is constantly applied to social spending. The tens of billions of dollars in the increase alone are enough to provide solar energy for the vast majority of US households. This is an obscene gift to the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses, the US military, an institution that has never passed an audit. The extra $37 billion that Congress added is almost twice the amount in Covid relief programs Congress ditched this year. The $100 billion cut proposed by Barbara Lee represents enough to fund the clean energy and child care provisions that were part of  President Biden’s BBB initiative response. With inflation mounting, our tax dollars are desperately needed to help people, especially the 140 million poor and working poor among us, not the Pentagon and weapons makers.

In short, we need to fund our communities, not war. By any metric, ours is a society in deep distress, with a pandemic that still kills hundreds every day. We live in a rich country with crumbling infrastructure, no universal healthcare, lackluster education, an impending climate catastrophe, a threatened democratic system, and even food insecurity. In choosing to raise the Pentagon’s budget to new heights year after year, we choose to ignore these problems, problems that represent serious threats to the nation and globe. We do so at our peril.