On May 9, the House Armed Services Committee overwhelmingly backed an initial version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act setting policy prescriptions and spending targets for over $700 billion of military activity for the fiscal year starting this October. The full House will likely consider, tweak, and ultimately approve a version of the bill the week of May 21.

This year’s initial House proposal raises concerns for at least two key reasons.

Soaring Spending

The first disappointment—the bill’s overall price tag—was actually not a surprise. The more than $700 billion in funding it would authorize for the Department of Defense and for the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons work is exactly in line with the two-year budget deal that Congress reached in February.

While this may not exactly represent a new decision for how to spend taxpayers’ money, it is still not a wise one.

Slashing vital help for the neediest while Pentagon and military contractors are flush with taxpayer cash: this is a deeply troubling combination for our country.

This $708 billion funding level will translate to a Pentagon meter running at over a $1 million a minute for American taxpayers. If nothing else, perhaps this will quiet the long-running lamentations from the Pentagon’s boosters in Congress over supposed shortfalls in the Pentagon budget—though there were always good reasons to question all these pleadings of Pentagon penury.

These astronomical spending levels are especially hard to swallow in light of the $23 billion in cuts to nutrition assistance that the House leadership is seeking in its proposed farm bill.

The budget savings this farm bill targets through cuts to nutrition support for the neediest Americans would add up to less than 12 days’ worth of Pentagon funding under the defense policy bill. Slashing vital help for the neediest while Pentagon and military contractors are flush with taxpayer cash: this is a deeply troubling combination for our country.

Using Your Tax Dollars for New Nukes

The second disappointment comes over nuclear weapons. Over the unified objections of the Committee’s Democratic minority, the House bill would endorse the Trump Administration’s vision for building several new nuclear weapons systems. The bill would also fund the Trump request, again over the objections of the minority, for tens of millions of dollars to modify several submarine-launched ballistic missile nuclear warheads for the explicit purpose of making it more credible that a president would actually order these missiles’ launch.

Here’s how we got here.

The Trump Administration in its January 2018 nuclear policy statement fretted that Russia now thinks the United States will shy away from using its higher-yield ballistic missile nuclear warheads in a conflict. Who outside of the Washington Beltway really thinks the problem is that President Trump will be too slow to order a nuclear launch? And as nuclear experts have made clear, the United States already has lower-yield options available on hundreds of cruise-missile and gravity-bomb delivered warheads.

“The idea of a low-yield nuclear weapon is kind of a mirage,” President Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz testified in January. “It is a nuclear weapon… [It] invites escalation.”

Even so, Administration fears of a newly imagined “deterrence gap” are driving these calls to shake millions more out of taxpayers’ pockets to pay for limited numbers of “low-yield” warheads for ballistic missile delivery.

This fuzzy thinking is not just foolish, it’s dangerous.

“The idea of a low-yield nuclear weapon is kind of a mirage,” President Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz testified in January. “It is a nuclear weapon… [It] invites escalation.” A lower yield warhead on a ballistic missile also dangerously invites miscalculation: If Russia detected an incoming sub-launched missile in a crisis, it would not know whether it was armed with a low-yield or high-yield warhead. Russia’s leaders in those dangerous moments could all too readily decide to respond quickly by launching a missile or missiles of its own.

Despite these causes for concern, the full House will almost certainly endorse the excess spending and these faulty nuclear priorities in its opening bid for this annual bill.

The real debate will now shift to the Senate and its Armed Services Committee. The Senate urgently needs to slow this rush to throw taxpayer dollars at an ill-considered nuke that the Navy does not need and that poses a risk of nuclear escalation that the country must not accept.