Why we should cut the Defense Budget: military spending and the 1033 program.
Since 2016, defense spending has increased by close to 20%. Trump asked for a record-breaking $731 billion. Republicans in Congress then jacked that up even more to $740.5 billion.
The U.S. spends more on military and war than the next 10 nations combined.
Over the past decades, the U.S. military’s budget has eaten more and more of our federal resources while funding for basic needs like education, housing, food-security, healthcare, clean water & air, have declined. Military spending is now 30 times greater than the federal education budget, 14 times greater than the federal housing budget, and 81 times greater than the environmental protection budget.
Our politicians narrowly limit “defense” to fighting (or preparing to fight) armed human enemies. But that definition excludes many of the most serious dangers that we must defend against today – climate catastrophe, virus pandemic, economic collapse, to name just three. Those threats are real and immediate, and we need to address them by shifting funds and priorities from the Pentagon to domestic programs.
Many politicians stoke voter fears for their partisan gain. They spout feverish rhetoric about “Wars on Crime,” “Wars on Drugs,” and “Wars on Terror.” But the truth is that the police and military serve completely different and incompatible roles. The purpose of the first is to maintain community safety and peace, the role of the second is to repel hostile invaders and mass-violence by internal enemies (such as the Confederacy in 1860). The strategies, tactics, training, and equipment of armies has no place in domestic police work, and “War on...” approaches to social ills and criminal behavior have made serious problems worse, not better.
Back in 1990, as part of the “War on Drugs,” the NDAA of that year established the 1033 Program to provide military equipment to civilian police forces. Since then, militarization of police has metastasized like a fatal cancer – drones, armored vehicles, explosives, helicopters, grenade launchers, bayonets, large-caliber weapons, and military-type responses to people who are peacefully and legally protesting. Equipping police officers with military equipment does nothing to reduce crime or protect law enforcement officers from violence. Equipping cops with weapons of war inevitably leads to a war within suppressed communities. Police forces that use military equipment are more likely to kill civilians than police forces that have not been militarized.
Now, we are facing serious crises back home: a pandemic, an unraveling economy, a crumbling infrastructure, and increased threat of natural disasters due to climate change. Americans desperately need help, and this help could be funded by the money we normally use for “defense”. Yet the military budget continues to dominate government spending.
A glaring example is this years’s NDAA. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) controls more than 50% of all federal spending. It also sets a wide range of national policies and priorities. Next week both the House and the Senate are scheduled to begin amending and voting on the NDAA. Republicans claim that the draft bill is a “bi-partisan” because Democrats on the Armed Services Committees voted for it. But its content overwhelmingly reflects Republican demands and priorities. For example, it:
Increases defense spending to a record-breaking $740 billion
Leaves untouched the 1033 program that militarizes civilian police departments
Fails to do anything effective to end our endless wars
Fails to hold the Pentagon accountable for how it uses taxpayer money
Ignores the climate crisis that threatens our lives and future
Fails to exert constitutionally-mandated congressional authority over war-making policy and spending.
This Republican “business-as-usual” NDAA ignores the real national emergencies we face. The pandemic is raging unchecked, hospitals are overwhelmed and under-funded, schools won't be able to safely reopen in the fall, local governments are going bankrupt, small businesses are dying, the economy is collapsing, there is massive unemployment, homelessness is rising sharply, more than 5 million newly-unemployed workers have just lost their healthcare, and the growing climate crisis threatens us with floods, fires, hurricanes, and crop-failures. The Republican response is to eliminate extended emergency unemployment benefits and cancel the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures while increasing military spending and proposing more tax-cuts for billionaires and corporations.
We want our Democratic Members of Congress to fight back. We’ve drafted a Legislative Letter outlining what we want to see in the NDAA. To add your signature to the letter use the Google form here. We’ve sent the letter to our MoC’s. Thank you to everyone who signed!
And, call your MoC’s on this issue! Tell them: cut the military budget and increase domestic spending.