Make no mistake: this is a war budget, for today and for years to come. It would fund more of everything and anything the Pentagon wants, but it would slash the basic support many struggling Americans need.
It seeks billions more on new generations of the weapons of war, but it endangers the diplomatic and development tools that actually prevent and end war. It calls for thousands more Americans to join up for fights old and new, but it offers no real strategy for how those fights will end, or when. It embraces a nuclear arms-race mentality that risks worsening existential dangers which are already far greater than we should tolerate.
Specific proposals for Pentagon spending that concern FCNL include:
- A $54 billion increase for Pentagon spending, and at least $6.8 trillion in Pentagon spending over ten years. For context, for 2015 the entire economies of Germany and the United Kingdom only totaled $6.2 trillion combined.
- $65 billion in unbudgeted Overseas Contingency Operations funding a year after the Pentagon received $82 billion above the budget caps that are supposed to cover military and non-military spending equally.
- $12.1 billion for 84 new fighter jets, including 70 Joint Strike Fighters, an aircraft plagued with software problems and designed for wars the U.S. isn’t fighting today.
- Billions for a new generation of nuclear weapons delivery systems, including $451 million for a new long-range nuclear cruise missile and a $216 million down-payment on a new intercontinental ballistic missile.
- A whopping $1 billion, 11% increase for the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons activities, and more to ramp up work on long-range extensions of U.S. gravity-dropped bombs, ground-launched ballistic missile warheads, cruise missile warheads, and sea-launched ballistic missile warheads.
If the Pentagon faces challenges, it is not because we spend too little on it: after adjusting for inflation, each year over the last decade our nation spent about the same or more on the military than we did in the highest years of Vietnam or the end of the Cold War. If the Pentagon faces challenges, it is because our nation’s leaders keep chasing militarized solutions in ever more places around the globe. It is also because the Pentagon fails to properly manage its own spending: after all, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that still hasn’t passed an audit.
When we blindly hand over our country’s resources to the Pentagon while starving successful programs that care for our neighbors, the earth, and each other, we have lost sight of our priorities as a country. President Trump’s budget is a budget of dangerous premises and false promises, not a budget for real security. It is a budget that destroys, not one that leads.
The good news is that it is up to Congress, not the President, to actually pass a budget. Your voice is more important than ever.
