Tell your Members of Congress & President Biden: we oppose the NDAA.

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Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

I oppose the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as it currently stands. Despite the defense industry's well-organized, well-funded, and highly deceptive scare campaign portraying China as an imminent military danger, we know that global warming and the climate crisis are the real national security threat that we most urgently need to address. The NDAA provides large sums to protect military bases from the fire, flood, drought, storm, and sea-level consequences of global warming. Yet it does nothing to protect the American people by addressing the root causes of the climate emergency, such as reducing the Pentagon's use of fossil fuels or redirecting defense research dollars towards alternative energy sources or carbon sequestration.

Americans voted for you because you promised immediate action on the climate emergency. We were heartened by the January 27 Executive Order, addressing it with a whole of government approach. Yet this NDAA neither reflects nor in any way implements that “whole of government” commitment. Moreover, some of the most important and necessary climate provisions in the Build Back Better Act have either been removed entirely or significantly weakened. Since it appears that the NDAA is now being expanded at the last minute to include the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), I urge you to insist that the climate standards and provisions that were taken out of the BBBA be added to the NDAA so that the massive defense budget finally begins to address the climate catastrophe that is now affecting us daily.

I am disgusted and repelled by the blatant hypocrisy of Republicans and conservative Democrats. They wail about the fully covered costs of investing in the American people and demand ever more cuts. Yet they eagerly vote for a bloated Defense Bill that is greater than the Pentagon even asked for, that is loaded with political pork, boondoggles, and corporate welfare, and that increases the national deficit they claim they are so concerned about.

Background

We’ve kept an eye on National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) negotiations for years now, because it controls 60% of all discretionary spending. The military has consumed an ever-increasing portion of federal resources. But by redefining the meaning of “national security,” Democrats have a chance to both direct a portion of national security funds towards climate defense and reduce the Pentagon share of our national budget – if they choose to wield that power. Let’s hope they take up that challenge.

This June, ISF wrote a detailed open legislative letter to Congress asking them to treat the climate catastrophe as a national security threat and address it in the NDAA legislation. Forty-nine other organizations signed on, and in June 2021 it was sent to the members and staff of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Our letter contained concrete suggestions for specific investments to address what the Pentagon and CIA have deemed a major national security threat since the beginning of this century.(*9)

More voters are recognizing that in a globalized world, national security relies on more than guns and soldiers alone. It requires an educated, healthy and productive workforce; a strong, vibrant economy; and a robust research and science infrastructure that recognizes global warming as a national security threat. Even though some of its more important provisions were stripped out by corporate Democrats, the Build Back Better Act responds more effectively to that 21st century understanding of national defense than does the proposed NDAA.

Unlike the NDAA, the Build Back Better Act, which addresses the climate crisis cited in so many Pentagon threat assessments for so many years (*5-9), is fully paid for via:

Ensuring large, profitable corporations pay their fair share, i.e. the bill requires companies that report over $1 billion in profits to shareholders to pay at least a 15 percent tax rate on those gigantic profits and imposes a 1 percent excise tax on publicly traded U.S. corporations for the value of their stock buybacks, which enrich their shareholders rather than invest in their companies or workers. (*2)
Ensuring the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share by improving the tax code to prevent tax avoidance, with measures like imposing a 5 percent surtax on individuals with incomes over $10 million and an extra 3 percent surtax on incomes over $25 million, which applies to the richest 0.02 percent of taxpayers. The bill also closes loopholes that some wealthy taxpayers have used to avoid paying the 3.8 percent Medicare tax on their trade or business income. (*2)
Investing in closing the more than $7 trillion projected 10-year tax gap that is largely a product of tax evasion by the wealthy. The bill ensures the wealthy pay the taxes they owe by strengthening the IRS’s ability to audit those with the highest incomes. This investment will not only help build a more equitable tax system, but also help close the tax gap and generate savings to pay for historic investments. (*2)

The Build Back Better Act is a crucial national security bill that deserves immediate passage, and unlike the NDAA, it is fully paid for by those who profited most from creating the global emergency in the first place.

References

Link to June ISF newsletter with short precis of the NDAA Open Letter that 49 groups signed
https://indivisiblesf.org/blog/2020/6/15/isfs-formal-letter-to-congress-ndaa-climate-change

Link to the Open Letter that 49 groups signed. http://indivisiblesf.org/s/NDAA_Climate.pdf

The Build Back Better Act: Transformative Investments in America’s Families & Economy, House Budget Office
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/movement-updates/whats-happening-with-bbb/, 11/12/21
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/11/08/if-build-back-better-fails-aoc-warns-we-may-have-just-locked-us-emissions , 11/08/21, Common Dreams
S. 2792, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, 10/21/21, Congressional Budget Office
On January 27, President Biden issued an Executive Order, “Putting the Climate Crisis at the Center of U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security,.” directing all agencies of the federal government to address the “national and economic security impacts of climate change“ and directs the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others to “consider the security implications of climate change,” in “developing the National Defense Strategy.”
The administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance issued March 3rd concluded: Recent events show all too clearly that many of the biggest threats we face respect no borders or walls, and must be met with collective action. Pandemics and other biological risks, the escalating climate crisis, cyber and digital threats, international economic disruptions, protracted humanitarian crises, violent extremism and terrorism, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction all pose profound and, in some cases, existential dangers.
On April 9, the Director of National Intelligence's Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community declared: “Ecological degradation and a changing climate will continue to fuel disease outbreaks, threaten food and water security, and exacerbate political instability and humanitarian crises ... [including] direct, immediate impacts — for example, through more intense storms, flooding, and permafrost melting.”
July 2015: DOD Releases Report on Security Implications of Climate Change
In October of 2009, the CIA established a new Center for the Study of Climate Change.
Pentagon planners in 2010 included climate change among the security threats identified in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Congress-mandated report that updates Pentagon priorities every four years.
January 2004: Pentagon released a report on the perils of abrupt climate change that startled the country for a while. It wasn’t written by global- warming activists, but by Peter Schwartz, former head of planning for Shell Oil and sometime CIA consultant, and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, a California think tank.

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