Many say that Washington is more divided than ever, but political quarrels in the nation’s capital and beyond are easily cast aside to unify against even the mere suggestion that perhaps the defense department’s budget might be a bit too high.
That’s what happened when reports emerged late last week that Representative Kevin McCarthy had secured a deal with rogue Republicans to become the next House speaker. In exchange for their votes, the Freedom Caucus – a group of more rightwing House GOP lawmakers – received assurances that the federal budget will freeze at FY2022 levels, which could effectively mean a cut to the Pentagon budget by anywhere from $75bn to $100bn.
The shrieks from official Washington were almost immediate. Former GOP representative Liz Cheney, for example, accused McCarthy of “weaken[ing] our national defense for his own personal gain”, while the Democratic representative Abigail Spanberger said “cutting our nation’s defense spending is shortsighted and dangerous”, adding that “doing it for speaker votes is unconscionable”. Others went so far as to liken proponents of cutting the US military budget to being “pro-Russia”.
Let’s keep in mind that the reported deal in terms of defense spending would merely keep the DOD budget at its FY2022 level – the highest since the second wold war – one that both Cheney and Spanberger themselves supported with their votes authorizing it.
But instead of seeing this proposal as a good opportunity to course-correct defense spending – which has been rife with waste, fraud and abuse for decades – the White House also came out swinging on Monday.
“This push to defund our military in the name of politics is senseless and out of line with our national security needs,” said the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, who added that any military budget cuts that are part of McCarthy’s speakership deal “mak[e] us less capable of keeping the American people safe and advancing our national security interests”.
Of course no one has proposed to “defund” the US military. Bates’s statement is just clumsy posturing seemingly meant to boomerang blowback some Democrats received for their “defund the police” rhetoric. And the irony is that the White House’s response also represents the worst of Washington politics whereby one must vigorously oppose any proposal from a political opponent regardless of its merit.
You also won’t hear any specifics from the White House or hawks in Congress and the media as to why modestly reducing the Pentagon budget will be so devastating to US national security. Reflexively opposing defense department cuts and supporting throwing more money at the Pentagon will always be good politics, particularly for lawmakers, as the weapons industry has carefully located defense industry jobs in nearly every state and congressional district in the country. That explains why Congress gave the Pentagon $45bn more than it asked for in last year’s defense authorization bill and barely anyone batted an eye.
But while maintaining the military-industrial complex is good politics, the reality is that reforming the Pentagon budget is good policy. We can fix well-established boondoggles like the F-35. The amount defense industry firms and its CEOs receive from the American taxpayer is borderline criminal. And the fact that the Pentagon has no idea how it spends its money – it has yet to pass a financial audit – should outrage us all, particularly anyone living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to save.
But also, as my colleague and defense spending expert William Hartung pointed out, a congressional budget office study last year found three ways Congress could responsibly reduce defense department spending and save $1tn over the next 10 years.
“A strategy that forswears sending large numbers of troops into regional wars,” Hartung said, “takes a more realistic view of the military threats posed by Russia and China, relies more on allies, and rolls back the Pentagon’s dangerous and unnecessary nuclear weapons buildup could save sums well beyond the $100 billion per year set out in the CBO’s illustrative options”.
Indeed, experts from across the ideological spectrum have come to similar conclusions and have offered modest proposals to reduce the Pentagon’s bloated budget over the years.
It’s a shame the White House jumped into this predictably disgraceful display of establishment Washington at its worst: blindly clearing a path for the endless flow of money into the Pentagon’s coffers without regard for whether it’s necessary or badly needed to be diverted elsewhere. In fact, if the Biden administration saw fit to – heaven forbid – find common cause in opposing throwing more money at an agency that doesn’t need it, it may just find a more constructive way to score political points.
Ben Armbruster is the managing editor of ResponsibleStatecraft.org, the news and analysis publishing platform of the Quincy Institute
